Just about a month ago, developer Koality Games revealed their upcoming boxing game Prizefighters, which looked to take the simple and arcadey mechanics of Nintendo’s classic Punch Out! series and marry them with a meatier experience in terms of character and career progression. Based on the many animated .gifs and info available in the game’s forum thread, it looked like Koality was on track for something quite special with Prizefighters. Well, today we have learned that the game is finished and shipped off to Apple for approval, and if all goes accordingly we’ll all be able to play Prizefighters when it officially launches tomorrow, December 14th. Koality has also released a proper game trailer for Prizefighters, check it out.
I was actually able to get my hands on an early version of Prizefighters, and although I wasn’t able to spend a TON of time with it I did really like what I saw. One thing I want to point out is its ingenious control scheme. It’s set up so that the 4 quadrants of the screen throw different punches; the top two throw left or right punches to the face and the bottom two do the same for body blows. Holding down the two top or bottom quadrants will block your face or body respectively, and swipes are used for dodging. What Koality has done that’s so brilliant is they allow you to define the horizontal and vertical lines that split the game into 4 quadrants, meaning if you drag the crosspoint of the axes into one of the lower corners of the screen then Prizefighters is totally playable one-handed. It’s a bit tough to explain but it feels really good in practice. Hopefully the approval process goes without a hitch and we’ll be throwing punches in Prizefighters in the next day or so.
