Getting Strong Now!!!
It's good, not great.
The game opens with a nice montage of clips from the five Rocky films with the "Gonna Fly Now" song over it. There are several modes of play to choose from. Exhibition, Movie, and Knockout Tournament.
There are many fighters to choose from in this game, both from the films and made up. A nice touch is Spider Rico, the guy Rocky fights at the very beginning of the first film, is available for you to use and you fight him in the first bout in Movie Mode.
Movie mode is really what you want to do. There are three different difficulty levels to play on, and I just did them in order. The early fighters are pretty easy to beat and they get progressively harder.
Rocky changes as the game goes on. You start out as "Rocky I" and fight a series of bouts until you get to "Apollo Creed I" and face him in a recreation of the fight from the first movie. In this game, unlike the movie, you have to beat him to move on, not just go the distance.
After each fight in movie mode you have a chance to train. You train on endurance, speed, strength, and determination. This includes using the speedbag, heavy bag, doing situps and jumping rope. You can do this manually, and honestly, some of them are pretty hard. You can auto train, but you get a higher rating if you score doing it manually.
After beating Apollo I you face another series of fighters as "Rocky II". Once you get through them you face "Apollo Creed II" and must defeat him.
After defeating Apollo's second incarnation you don the yellow gloves and trunks featured in Rocky III. At some point before your bout with Clubber Lang, Apollo becomes your trainer. Then you get to fight Clubber.
After you defeat Clubber Lang you turn into "Rocky IV" with the stars and stripes trunks. Fight a few fights and you see a video game recreation of Apollo Creed's death by Drago from Rocky IV. Then you face Ivan Drago, and he is hard. It took me more tries to beat him than any other fighter. Beat Drago and become "Rocky V".
A few fights later and you see a recreation of Tommy Gunn training under Rocky and his ultimate betrayal. Once that's done, in the game's best fight sequence, you take on Tommy Gunn outside Mickey's gym street-style, just like in the film. The sound effects change and it is truly the most fun part of the movie fight bouts. There are no rounds, you just fight until you can knock him down three times to win. The only weird part is a bystander counting when one of the fighters gets knocked down. When you beat Tommy in the Medium difficulty, you unlock the Rocky Statue. So when you are fighting exhibition, you can actually use the Rocky statue as your boxer, and there are metal clanging sound effects! Priceless.
Beat movie mode in the highest difficulty and you unlock Mickey as a boxer. Fun!
This is a fun game that recreates the fights from the various films very well. My only complaint with that is you can only fight Tommy Gunn street-style in the movie mode.
Graphics are good and the characters are rendered nicely. It's as if you are in control of the film itself.
Sound effects are good, but I think the crowd noise at the fights seem a little sparse.
The song is great, but it gets old after a while. I wish they had thrown Eye of the Tiger in there once in a while.
The only other gripe I have with this title is no Thunderlips aka Hulk Hogan to fight. As I said above, I enjoyed the street fight because of the change of pace, so a bout with Thunderlips would have been a welcome addition.
The Knockout Tournament is cool, you pick a fighter and then randomly fight other boxers that the CPU picks for you as the competition goes on.
This is also a great two player game. I recommend the Over the Shoulder camera view when you play alone and the standard view when you play someone else.
You'll be humming the Rocky theme for hours.