Ultimate Body Blows

The Good
Maybe perhaps one thing: knocking a character down gives off a nice satisfying "KER-THUNK!" when they hit the floor. I seriously can't think of anything else. Except that there's both much better and much worse.

The Bad
First I have to get one thing off my chest: I was born and raised on primarily Japanese designed games, and while there are a few decent European and American efforts in game design, this one is definitely not one of them!

First off, the game already gets one strike for its terrible, unforgiving control method. Come on...ONE BUTTON?? Just to perform ALL these moves? Oh wait...what moves? I forgot! Every time I attempt to press said button my characters do NOTHING!! They just stand there like morons looking at their opponent! That's nine times out of ten that this happens! Then just to pull off a move...JEEZ!! Good luck if you even see them! I guarantee you that you'll be beating the joystick to death before you even see one move!

The music and sounds...GOD!! First off, they wouldn't work on my computer at first, and when I finally did get them to work, I wish I hadn't. The music is that damn horrible Euro-rave crap which I so loathe, and it's always just ONE damn song playing through the WHOLE game practically! I felt like screaming out after hearing it looping constantly! The sounds? Well, other than horribly sampled voices, the smacks, slaps, thunks, boinks, and whatnot all sounded WAY too loud! In fact, they were several decibels louder than needed.

The graphics are simply...low grade. They're too cartoony and of course badly colored. Typical European game graphics. (Note: I'm not trying to put any European down with that comment, but I'm sorry! Have you TAKEN a look at your game graphics lately??) The animation...wait, what animation? There's hardly any in this game! Everyone moves like a bunch of non-articulate action figures! Plus, their designs are really ridiculous, and far too generic to be memorable. Dull, dull, dull...ECH!!

The Bottom Line
Ultimate Body Blows just goes to prove one thing: some regions of the world just shouldn't try their hands at certain genres. Leave it to the Japanese designers to code fighters, and leave it to the Europeans to code racing and football games and adventure games, or whatever it is the European code houses are best at. Team 17's fighting game attempt is just a shambles, and doesn't come close to half of the fighters from Japan. A real stinker if there ever was one.