It feels like just yesterday that developer Koality Game released the mobile boxing game Prizefighters on the App Store, but somehow that was actually nearly three years ago now, in December of 2017. Boy does time fly. Prizefighters looked like your average Punch-Out!! homage on the surface, and it certainly had that 8-bit era aesthetic and simplified mechanics, but below that surface it offered one of the most full-featured boxing games on mobile that hewed more towards a simulation than an arcade-style game. Prizefighters has only grown since its 2017 release, receiving numerous updates including full-blown online multiplayer. We even included it in our list of the 100 Best Games of 2017.
Yes, Prizefighters is excellent, but now it’s time to enter a new era with a sequel, aptly titled Prizefighters 2. There are a couple of fundamental changes this time around. First and foremost is that you are no longer just a stationary fighter. You can now move forwards and backwards in the ring, and the distance between you and your opponent can affect things like punch strength and knockout probability. You can also now punch straight out of a dodging or ducking move, making the back and forth action between you and your opponent much more fluid and satisfying. Check out the announcement trailer for Prizefighters 2.
One other big change in this sequel you likely noticed in that trailer is the new onscreen controls. The original Prizefighters utilized a smart control scheme that broke the entire screen up into 4 different quadrants, essentially 4 giant buttons, with different actions pulled off depending on which quadrant or quadrants you tapped or by performing swipe gestures. It was an elegant scheme, but also limited due to its simplicity. Prizefighters 2 basically takes that “4 buttons" idea from the original but adds a set of those buttons to both sides of the screen. The buttons on the right side handle your mid and high punches, the buttons on the left are for moving back and forth, dodging, and ducking. There’s also an additional button on both sides of the screen that’s dedicated to blocking.
While I’ll miss the minimalist controls of the first game, I love the added complexity these new controls allow for in Prizefighters 2. This will also extend to a revamped Career Mode which will feature a much more authentic recreation of the path a fighter has to take from an amateur just starting out to the overall champ, rather than simply fighting a ladder of opponents as in the first game. It’s all sounding quite fantastic, and while Koality is shooting for a mid-December release, they’re currently taking on some beta testers to help shape the final outcome. The original Prizefighters was heavily shaped and improved based on player feedback on our forums, and Koality hopes for the same with this sequel. If you’d like too try it out, head over to the game’s thread in our forums and let Koality know you’re interested and then look for Prizefighters 2 to launch hopefully at some point next month.
