Rumble Roses XX

Oh dear God. So much flesh! No one could really be blamed for hoping that Rumble Roses XX on the Xbox 360 was going to be a really brilliant game. Actual awesome gameplay would give you the perfect excuse to buy it, but even if it were a truly great game most of us could admit that our motivation lay elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with wanting to see a very attractive lady pick up another very attractive lady, fling her to the ground and then squash her. Sorry, wrestling fans, if I just distilled your favourite sport down to banal simplicity, but that's exactly what Rumble Roses XX does, so tough titty… literally.

Lets get the gameplay out the way so we can get to the good stuff. The wrestling here is an extremely simplified version of developer Yuke’s SmackDown engine but it lacks any of the depth of the WWE games. Each of the 11 characters have their own moves built around some basic grapples, pins and punches. There are some special moves thrown in like humiliation moves where you beat down your opponent to the point were they are blushing and in a complete state. You can then use special moves like taunting or smacking them on the bottom. Oo err.

Obviously, this 360 title is a follow up to the original Rumble Roses on the PS2. They’ve stripped out some of the annoying things like the ridiculous storyline but have forgotten to replace it with any kind of real structure. Instead, you’ll be faced with a menu map that has a bunch of different types of fights you can enter - but all of them are pretty much the same.

There is a kind of street fighting variety that basically takes out any strategy and leaves you to punch each other in the face for a few minutes until someone goes down. It appears to be an attempt to recreate a Dead Or Alive style of immediacy that you don’t get in wrestling games, but considering that the wrestling/fighting moves are so slow and deliberate it fails spectacularly.