Rumble Roses PlayStation 2

A guilty pleasure that's actually best shared

By Yahoo! Shopping User  Aug 9, 2006

Pros: Fun gameplay, hot chicks with the best jiggle physics ever

Cons: looooong load times, iffy voice acting, limited selection of fight areas

To all appearances, Rumble Roses is a terrible game. After all, it features nearly naked women, which surely must be a cover-up for bad gameplay, right? Not. Rumble Roses is a surprisingly good wrestling game, which also happens to have only female wrestlers, which also happen to be scantily clad. That's it.

For the record, I have never played a wrestling game before, for any platform. Wrestling as a "sport" has never interested me, apart from being something to laugh at for a couple minutes while channel-surfing. Rumble Roses didn't do much to change my mind on that account, but it showed me that wrestling can be a whole lot of fun. The "plot" for the Story mode of the game is ridiculously insane, so bad that I was constantly laughing out loud. This actually encouraged me to play through with all 10 characters, and again with all their alter-egos, just to see how bad/funny it could get.

The characters are quite diverse, ranging from sexy nurse to sexy cowgirl and sexy ninja. Pretty much every character can be given the adjective sexy, really. You can tell the developers spent most of their time working on the look of the girls. In fact, the lead developer for the game admitted in an interview that when they had to choose between getting the girls to look really good, or adding in 4-player tag-team mode, they chose the former. I say they made the right choice.

Of course, the only reason I kept playing that long was that the game itself is loads of fun. Controls are tight and responsive. They're also deceptively simply, mostly using the four main buttons and R1. The real trick is timing everything correctly, and using counter-moves against your opponent. I really enjoyed figuring out all the grapples and submissions for each character, and there are a fair number of them. Then there are a few weapons to add to the mix, which allow you to perform attacks that probably wouldn't show up in the WWE.

To spice things up, there is a vow system, where your character chooses certain tasks to perform during the fight, such as executing five diving attacks. This adds challenge to the fights, and is the way to transform characters to their alter-ego version in Exhibition mode.

After building up the special meter, Lethal and Killer moves can be performed, which are often fight-enders. You can also build up the opponent's "humiliation" guage, by doing humiliating moves on them, and then perform an H-Move on them. This is pretty much a guaranteed end to the fight, as well as a whole lot of fun to watch.

Despite all of this, I was bored with the game after a couple weeks, mostly due to the not-so-tough AI. What has renewed my interest is playing with a friend. The game is much more challenging, and thus much more enjoyable. Thing is, your friend will have to be comfortable with a game that shows frequent (and I mean nearly constantly) panties and bounteous bosom-flesh.

However, things aren't all roses in this game. There are only four fighting rings available, one beach-side mudpit and three arenas which seem to differ only in the shade of lighting. As well, the three arenas all have the same weapons, so essentially there are only two fight locations in the game. Bo-ring. Worse is the load time for each fight. I don't understand how it can take five minutes to load two characters. Seriously.

In short, if you own a PS2 and not an Xbox360, and you'd like a wrestling game to play with a friend that's very easy on the eyes, give Rumble Roses a go.