If there's one thing that there isn't enough of in video games today, it's the chance to play characters based on Mr T. With that in mind, my expectations were somewhat high when Rocky Legends came into the office -- while you couldn't call T's "acting" in Rocky III anything but average at best, there's something ferocious about Clubber Lang that demands respect. Rocky Legends, however, doesn't demand respect on the same level -- while it's a workable enough boxing title, it never really strays much at all from what boxing games have been doing from time immemorial, and as such it ultimately fails to satisfy. Those looking for a better boxing experience would be well served to check out EA's superlative Fight Night 2004, even if you don't like the analog control method that title employs.
Rocky Legends does have an interesting premise, however. Rather than just go down the route of most of the Rocky branded games -- including the Activision-distributed immediate predecessor to this one -- by just making you make your way through the five film's plots, Legends instead plays the "What if?" card to some success, by giving you the choice of any of the film's main combatants, and the aim of making up the back-story that leads up to each of their films. So if you choose Clubber Lang (and given the choice of Lang, Rocky, Drago, Creed or Gunn, I wouldn't be willing to bet that anyone doesn't choose Lang), you'll start off with prison fights, working your way up through the ranks to the point where you can challenge for the world title. Every once in a while, you'll get a brief cut scene to advance the plot a touch. Sadly, these are few and far between, and they don't really tell enough of a story to make them anything more than window dressing.
Rocky Legends' core boxing engine neatly falls into the category of being solid but unspectacular. All of your basic punches, high and low, are handled with the controller's face buttons, while the shoulder buttons modify for defending, uppercuts, and special punches. So what it's really doing is something that's been done before, both with the Rocky licence, and in other boxing titles such as EA's now defunct Knockout Kings and even (shudder) Mike Tyson Heavyweight Boxing. In-between bouts you can improve your fighter's stats with button mashing mini-games -- just like every other boxing title out there.
The animation in the game also fails to impress; while there's not much that is genuinely buggy, the fighters themselves generally don't react enough to punches, and the end effect of this is that you don't really feel that the punches you're throwing have that much effect. The exception to this are super punches, activated by slowly tapping the R1 button (on the PS2 version we reviewed) before choosing your punch. Super punches are very slow, but utterly devastating if you time them to hit correctly. The title's audio is likewise shaky; while it uses the series music to clever effect during the tense period before a knockdown, it's also responsible for some of the worst sound-alikes ever heard on a licensed title. Sure, I can accept that Sly might want just a bit too much money to be economically viable, and Burgess Meredith is excused on the grounds of being deceased, but surely the developers could have sprung the five bucks it would have cost to plonk Dolph Lundgren, Mr T or Carl Weathers into a recording studio. Heck, for five bucks you probably could have got all three of them.
Ultimately Rocky Legends is a workable arcade-style boxing title that doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from the competition -- it's the Rocky V of boxing games, if you will. As such, it's not a bad title for a night's rental, especially if you've got friends who you'd like to pummel, but it fails to deliver enough to make it a worthy purchase option.
