Turn Based Boxing: Tactics - Legends Edition

Let's get the bad out the window first: Once you're done struggling to get the game to a proper window scaling (with in game UI scaling and the Zoom In and Out) it gets visually ok-ish. Boxers don't look great, UI icons are pixelated and screen backgrounds are straight ugly. Music and sounds are basic imho. Now, for the rest of the experience: Early gameplay is like a Battle Brothers' combat system but with 3AP/turn and 5 different attack types and their counters along with the ability to Feint/Clinch/Shove...) Managing your Guard and Stamina also come in play, leading to tactical choices with perma-death floating above every choice. Each boxer as bonus traits and his/her own skill tree (Battle Brothers' style here again) along with favorite attributes that cost less money to increase. This allows you to have boxers use different strategies to win matches without risking their skin. Boxer creation is pretty complete and helps keeping the game fresh for a bit longer. Money is used to increase your boxers' attributes and also to get more lockers to get more boxers, which in terms get you more money each passing day. Matches can either be played manually or spectated. The AI roster is made of historical boxers and procedural ones. I'd say that there's fun here for at least 10 hours if you don't mind the negatives mentionned.

Great game! I love the perks, and all around game play loop. Very satisfying amount of detail into the perks, character customization, and also the ability to edit certain game modifiers. However, as of right now the game is quite repetitive in terms of game play loop. it's enjoyable, but i'm hitting 16hrs now and its already getting very stale. Plz add some more variety and depth to the gameplay loop and also game in general. some ideas to help maybe: - could add a yearly award ceremony that rewards things like: boxer of the year, rising star, fight of the year, etc etc - could add more depth in terms training, and also money. right now there isn't anything to use the money on besides buying more fighters or spending it on training. i would like to see you implement an actual "store" where players can purchase equipment or other things that maybe give like % boosts to certain things or other modifiers - i'd like to see weight classes become more of a thing, if possible - some type of "news" app would be cool, with some auto generated headlines of some sort that actually draw off in-game events - add more game modifiers to the settings annnnnd i think thats about it as far as off the top of my head ideas go. to leave off, i just want to summarize things: i do recomend the game, and i believe any turn based tactics and MMA fans will find this game a very very fun one. however, it is quite shallow and bare bones. looks like crap, and also the rings can use A LOT of work but yes, very fun title, im just a bit sad its not much of a deeper experience. getting very stale and repetitive already (but worth checking out, especially if it goes on sale)

I originally gave this game a reluctant/qualified thumbs up but I changed my mind, it's actually too janky. I really want to like this game, and honestly I'll probably keep playing it on and off. But would I recommend it? Not really. I say what I like about the game further down, but first, what I don't: This is one of the most "made by a single guy" games I've ever played. Everything about the way it is presented sucks. EVERYTHING. The UI is terrible. The management menus are ugly, confusing and have too many buttons - including several you have to press to show information that should be visible when you open that screen by default,like stats of potential opponents. The tutorials are incomplete for how complex the game is, and also seem to be in two parts, some as popup windows and some as little tip windows that are part of the interface itself. Why? Some text is inconsistently formatted, misspelled or has poor grammar (wrong use of your and you're, etc). Also, the music track (singular) restarts when you switch between menus, which is really really jarring and a really basic mistake. You can tell it was coded in in 2 minutes as an afterthought. It's like the dev has never experienced playing his own game. It's also just kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ to play the management side. The mechanism to hire randomly generated new boxers is crap - two buttons that do the same thing AFAIK, no boxer is saved once generated so you can't tab to your current boxers to check if a new one is a good fit for your roster or you'll lose that boxer, etc etc... When picking a fight, of which the most important part is analysing the other boxer, there is some information that just isn't there. e.g. One talent gives different bonuses against lightweight and heavyweight fighters. How do I know if someone is a lightweight or heavyweight boxer? I don't. There's no way to tell. AFAIK weight class is not mentioned at any point anywhere else in the game. The combat UI is awful too. The combat log is ugly, takes up too much of the screen and can't be adjusted, and moves too fast, but you need to have it open to understand what is going on in the fights because there are no animations whatsoever that tell you visually what is happening in the fight. There are randomly a bunch of tabs you can access during the fight for info but only one actually shows the arena, why are they not integrated into the fight UI as sub menus? It breaks the immersion of the experience badly. The fighting part should be as immersive and look as slick as possible as it's the main thrust of the gameplay, but it's the ugliest part of a butt-ugly game. There's also somehow a lack of information about key aspects of the fight, despite all these tabs. Oh, the opposing boxer has the "cornered" and "against the ropes" debuffs. Great. How can I quickly check what those do? Oh, I can't. There's no tooltip when I mouse over them and no reference tab for me to check the various statuses. Awesome. The voiceover lines in combat are also not very well performed and very, very repetitive. The graphics are extremely pixelated but I think that's a style decision so it's ok, and it kind of fits the vibe. I like the googly-eyed boxers. In general though, it's like playing a shareware game from the 90s, and not in a good way. Absolutely zero thought or effort has been put into the presentation or UX of this game whatsoever. You cannot just make a game with good gameplay and then chuck a bunch of text on it to make it vaguely playable as an afterthought. You even have to manually create a save folder for the save file and then manually navigate to it every time you save the game. It doesn't even have a full-screen setting in the options. Come on dude. Even 90s shareware had display settings and auto-created save files. I also feel like the game will get boring pretty soon as there's no gameplay loop beyond "win/lose a fight and train up boxers a bit more and win/lose a fight and train up boxers a bit more and..." and so on. No events, no storylines, no nothing. Just boxing and training. It's dry af. (Though the dev did recently add a lineal championship which is fun and would be great to see more of. And I'm still a low-ranked boxer so there could be more story stuff once you get further in, IDK. I'm not holding my breath.) DESPITE ALL OF THAT, the core concept of the game is really great. Battle Brothers + Teamfight Manager = Battle Boxers. I trained up a dude to be the people's champion, double the money from fights, oh hell yeah. Took a big money fight, couldn't hack it, tried to fight on after getting knocked down and getting back up... dude died in the ring. Damn. There goes my prodigy. Should've thrown in the towel earlier. Bad management. It seems a little bit too easy to win fights where you're evenly matched on stats - once you learn the basic mechanics and combos (took me about half an hour) you can easily drop an opposing boxer multiple times in the first round and so you win most fights easily, meaning when you do come up against a tougher boxer, you're not used to the challenge. The difficulty curve is weird. But I actually like the basic combat loop more than Battle Brothers because it's so much simpler. No terrain, no needlessly complex weapon and armor interactions, just punching people in the face. The way guard works is cool, the punch combos and different tactical options are cool too. I don't know much about the sport but it feels like this game was made by someone with a genuine appreciation of boxing as well as tactical games. I wish I could give it a sideways thumb, because the basic idea is really great, and if it was expanded and refined it could be a real indie gem. But there are so many basic, infuriating issues with the way the game is presented and designed. I don't think I've ever felt like I overpaid for a $15 game before but I do now. If it's still being developed it should be Early Access, and if it isn't it should be cheaper. I love sports management games (especially Teamfight Manager) and Battle Brothers-style tactical RPGs so it's definitely one of those "games I didn't know I needed but is perfect for my tastes." It's just extremely janky and barebones and frustrating to play. Hopefully it keeps getting developed and improved.