Knockout Home Fitness Review (Switch)

The Switch is slowly but surely becoming home to a new dawn of fitness gaming. The success of Ring Fit Adventure has clearly inspired a new batch of keep-fit ​​titles like Fitness Boxing 2, Active Life Outdoor Challenge, and even Nintendo’s limited-release Jump Rope Challenge, all vying for a slice of the fitness pie. But it is not such a big piece: after all, they need to take care of their waist.

Knockout Home Fitness is the latest contender to step into the ring and attempt to hit the competition from behind. Sadly though, it features more of an Anthony Joshua performance and ultimately disappointing.

Known as FiNC Home Fit In Japan, Knockout Home Fitness has two main modes to choose from. Personal training is the main one, but it can only be played once a day. It offers a curated daily workout, based on the setting you choose. This includes your overall goal (weight loss, strength building, or staying active) and which part of the body to focus on (upper, lower, abs, or full body).

Aside from these two settings and the option to choose a 10, 20, or (once unlocked) 30 minute workout time, there’s really not much more flexibility in Personal Training mode. Their goal is simply to offer you a different series of courses every day, trying to keep each workout feeling fresh.

You get a daily stamp every time you complete a personal training session and then you can refer to a graph to study how many calories you have burned and how many repetitions you have done over time. You can also enter your weight whenever you want, so you can track your BMI and weight loss changes on the graph over time.

Once you are done with Personal Training, you will be locked out until the next day, which means that all you have left to play with is the second mode, 3-Minute Fitness. It consists of 60 separate workouts, each lasting 3-5 minutes and offering various intensities. Only a handful of these are unlocked at first, but more will be available as you discover them in Personal Training. These workouts are also divided into five different categories: Warm Up, Boxing, Kickboxing, Fighting (incorporating Muay Thai moves), and a final Challenge section with more intense sessions. However, aside from choosing your workouts, your other options are quite limited.

You can choose from four trainers (two of which are locked at the beginning of the game) and three different studios, none of which are particularly inspiring. There are also 25 music tracks to choose from, but unlike Fitness Boxing games, they are not based on popular songs. They’re a mix of EDM, Techno, Trance, Rock, and Hip Hop, and while they’re harmless enough, they’re hardly memorable. That said, some of the tracks almost act like achievements, because they are locked and can only be unlocked by achieving target scores on specific challenges, which at least adds some kind of objective to the game.

The workouts themselves are exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from the Wii era of fitness games. As with the Fitness Boxing series, you are shown a series of icons representing different strokes on the left and right side and, holding a Joy-Con in each hand, you must execute them to the beat of the music. Since it incorporates several different fighting styles, the attacks you are asked to perform vary quite a bit. Expect to do jabs, crosses, uppercuts, blocks, hooks, knees, elbows, kicks, squat punches – the whole thing. On paper (well, on a screen), it seems like an impressive degree of variety.

The problem is that each movement is tracked in one of two ways: either by registering any rapid movement of the Joy-Con, or none at all. Regardless of what type of hit you are asked to perform, you can simply flick the Joy-Con and get a perfect grade as long as you sync it to the beat.

Kicks, meanwhile, are counted no matter what you do. Instead of tying a Joy-Con to your leg like you do in Ring Fit Adventure and Active Life Outdoor Challenge, the game here has no way of tracking what you’re doing with your feet. As such, it only gives you the benefit of the doubt and continues your punch combination even if you’re standing there.

What this ultimately means is that you can get perfect scores in every workout simply by sitting on the couch eating chips and shaking your wrist to the beat when needed. Of course, you would only be fooling yourself this way, and the only pounds you would end up losing would be the money you spent on the game, but it is an indicator that there really isn’t much gambling here to speak of.

Yes, the same can be said for Fitness Boxing 2, but at least it has a wider range of options and tries to keep things somewhat interesting by giving the player a broader and more varied list of achievements, while also appealing more to mindsets. collector of players. . Fitness Boxing 2 had nine trainers compared to the four on offer here, and each had a wide range of unlockable outfits, as well as a kind of mini side quest where you could try to find a combination of outfits that they were really happy to do. use. .

It was hardly Civ VI in terms of complexity, but it added a bit of interactivity to the procedures and tried to add the ‘personal’ to its personal trainers. After all, all the trainers in these games are just fancy mannequins (almost literally, in the case of Wii Fit) who are only there to show you how to do the exercises. However, when you put one in an ill-fitting costume in Fitness Boxing 2 and they complain, it gives the thing a look of character that is completely missing here.

In essence, the game does nothing enormously bad. You’re buying it for a combat-based home fitness program, and that’s what you get. The problem is, there are plenty of other alternatives to a $ 39.99 game these days, and Knockout Home Fitness has to do a little more than put together a bunch of punching animations and ask you to copy them while saying “great.” every time you notice some Joy-Con movement.

As it is, you’d get an equally good workout and a lot more variety by loading the YouTube app on your Switch and finding some workouts there, while using a free fitness app to track your weight and BMI that way. When you can’t find a real game here, there’s really no need to spend $ 40 on a bunch of avatar-hosted 3-minute routines when there are real people, some of whom even have a bit of charisma, waiting on YouTube to. give you free trainings.

It could be argued that the Switch simply does not have the necessary drivers for a truly interactive fitness game. Say what you want about the Xbox Kinect, but it was one of the few devices to date that really catered to fitness titles because (when it worked) it could give real feedback on a gamer’s technique and form. Most of the other alternatives, including the Joy-Cons, are just a case of tracking a basic movement and hoping the player is willing to suspend disbelief enough when ‘qualified’.

That’s why the best fitness games on Nintendo systems are the ones that offer a little more to make up for the lack of precision. Ring Fit Adventure’s story mode and custom Ring-Con controller. Wii Fit minigames, licensed Just Dance music, and varied choreography. Yes, even the unlockable Fitness Boxing 2 trainer suits. When precise tracking isn’t offered, you need to have more than a bunch of short workouts to make your game more engaging than YouTube. In that regard, Knockout Home Fitness unfortunately doesn’t do enough.