Rumble Roses XX Review (X360)

Rumble Roses XX is an all-female wrestling game from Konami and developer Yukes. The in-ring action is decent and the girls are fairly good looking, but there are way too many roadblocks standing between you and having any real fun with the game. The single player is bland, the system for unlocking stuff is absolutely horrible, and there just isn’t enough meat to the gameplay to keep you interested for very long. It can be an enjoyable game at times, but Rumble Roses XX is a rental at best.

Gameplay

For the in-ring action, Rumble Roses XX uses a modified version of the SmackDown! wrestling engine from Yukes. You have strikes and grapples and using them in conjunction with different directions on the stick or d-pad performs different moves. Different positions such as standing face-to-face, back-to-face, or your opponent laying on the ground or in the corner gives you new moves for that specific situation. There is also a reversal system in place to make sure you can take punishment as well as you can dish it out. As you perform moves and reversals, two meters increase. The first meter governs your finishing moves (killer, lethal, and tag team Double X moves) and the second meter fills when you do something embarrassing to your opponent. When this meter is filled you can perform a special h-move to end the match in a slick submission. All in all, the gameplay is quite fun, but it is rather limited. The movelist for each character just isn’t very long at all and after a couple of hours you have seen most of what the gameplay has to offer.

Single Player

Rumble Roses has several different modes to keep you occupied. The first, and biggest, of which is the single player mode. There are several venues to compete in, three of which are normal matches along with one street fight arena and an island paradise where you wrestle in swimsuits and the loser has to do something silly. The street fight is one of the coolest modes because it plays more like a 3D fighting game than a wrestling game. Each player has an energy bar and you just attack until it reaches zero. In the single player you are free to switch characters at any time and as you play you unlock new costumes and can also adjust the muscles of your character so they do more damage and you can also adjust their body size so they, er, jiggle more. The goal is to eventually win either the single or tag team championship. Another single player mode is the photo shoot mode where you can dress up a character any way you like and then pose them and take photos which you can share on Xbox Live. Photo mode = lame.

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