Rumble Roses XX for Xbox 360 Reviews by Gamers

Schoolgirl, nurse, cowgirl, ninja. Whatever your fetish, Rumble Roses XX has it. Unfortunately, what the first "wrestling" title on the Xbox 360 doesn't have is stirring gameplay, an interesting story or any real lasting value. To Konami's credit, all it wanted to do was create interactive girl-on-girl action, and in that, at least, Konami succeeded.



In terms of a pure wrestling title, Rumble Roses XX, which is more of a "port-and-a-half" than a true sequel to 2004's Rumble Roses, squeaks by with a simplified version of the Smackdown engine. The controls are tight and easy: press X to strike and Y to grapple. Right Bumper is used to block and, in combination with X and Y, triggers a reversal, which is the bread and butter of the Smackdown engine.



Being a next-generation game and all, you'd expect RRXX to have some standout next-generation features like create-a-crotch-exposing-submission-hold or even create-an-undergarment, but you'd be wrong. RRXX is basic Rumble Roses at heart: a number of female combatants and their respective alter egos, very few game modes and environments and a complete lack of story.



RRXX does utilize some nice features on Xbox Live. Obviously, playing half-naked catfight is more fun online than by yourself in a dark room, and the Xbox Live servers performed well with only a few instances of lag. There's a strange Konami ranking system at work, starting you out at the letter grade F and moving you up to A and then, finally, the S grade, whatever that means. Also, you can take still-shots of your customized Rose and share them online, although we are pretty sure this violates about four laws in the state of Utah -- we're still checking.



Visually, the models are stunning and some of the best we've seen yet. The animations are smooth and fluid, although there are occasional clipping issues with the ropes or ponytails floating through a girl's back. There is still a lot of satisfaction to be had in applying the camel clutch or the Boston crab -- seriously, some of these devilish submission holds give even Hot Coffee a run for its money. In many instances, you'll have camera control as your opponent whimpers in masochistic pain and you can view just about every crease and crevice imaginable.



The wrestling gameplay holds up pretty well, although there are still not enough moves in the game. You can play one or two matches and see every move your Rose has in her arsenal. Humiliation moves and killer moves, which is fancy talk for finishing moves, stave off the monotonous gameplay for a while, but once you've seen every girl's sexy ring introduction and sexy humiliation move, there really isn't much reason more to play.



There are some problems in the squared circle too. Each Rose has a few moves that render the opponent "groggy," or stunned. In the case of Miss Spencer, the hot little schoolteacher, you can grapple and then bitch-slap an opponent, spinning her around and stunning her and also filling the humiliation meter. From there, you get behind her and unleash the atomic drop, another groggy-inducing, humiliating move. After the opponent bounces off your smoothly-shaven knee, you can do it over and over again until the humiliation meter is filled, at which point you can unleash the crotch-exposing H-move and usually pain the opponent into submission. A number of Roses have move-sets like this and the game is reduced to a boring pattern of stun move, stun move, stun move...humiliation move, then pinfall or submission.





Also, killer moves, lethal moves and humiliation moves are way too easy to pull off. When you fill the respective meter, all you need to do is hit a button prompt, which will trigger a quick cutscene, and the move starts. The only problem is that if your opponent was standing up, in the cutscene she'll suddenly be on the ground as you start to fold her into a 36-24-36 pretzel, which feels cheap. At least make the move position-sensitive. As it stands, it looks a little sloppy.



In the single-player game, you choose a wrestler and hit the map mode, which is deceivingly larger than it appears. There's a locker room, where you can change costumes and options, a museum, where you view artwork of the ladies, then an exhibition icon, three match icons, a Queens match icon and a Street Fight icon. There's no ladder to move up. Random "championship" matches pop up for no understandable reason, but there's no reason to care. You just go to one of the matches and fight, building up your Rose's popularity meter, which takes only like four or five wins to do. The only real goal, to me, is to unlock different costumes.



The Street Fight mode transforms RRXX into a dumbed-down Tekken where you fight the best two of three rounds. The Queens match is perhaps the most exciting. The loser is forced to do the opponents bidding, be it a sultry Yoga dance, pose like a kitten, do radio gymnastics or a number of other things you would usually pay a quarter to look through a small peephole to see. Of the regular matches in the arena, on a skyscraper or on a rock formation in the desert, there are a variety of random combinations like battle royales and tag matches as well as the old one-on-one. Keep in mind that there are only six different venues -- even Street Fighter II had more.



The sound is a blend of rock and hip-hop that was scraped off the sticky floor of a nudie bar -- very authentic stuff here. As expected, the comical voice-overs, taunts and dialog return as the Roses unleash a flurry of one-liners best suited to open scenes in Cinemax original movies.







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