The answer to what would happen if you crossed Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! with ’90s Maxim magazine culture, VanillaBeast Retro Knock-Out! is positioned as a lewd, crude, and unapologetically rude updating of the classic NES title. Borrowing the exact look of the fights from Punch-Out and leaning into its trademark pixelated style, your enjoyment of this game will depend on how fond you were of that old game and your preferences for raunchy humor. As someone who considers himself to be not too easily offended (and wasn’t by the demo), I found Retro Knockout‘s in-your-face politically incorrect sensibility to instead be mostly hollow, unfunny, and kind of desperate.
The retro gameplay from the late ’80s inside the ring makes a much more charming return than the crass comedy that’s seemingly been transported from an earlier era as well. With only three fights that can be played within the demo, it only seeks to give you a small taste of what the game has to offer while promising to save the truly tasteless parts for the full game.
Let’s go toe-to-toe with everything that’s on display in the sneak peek to discuss what looks promising and what might need some tweaking if the game is going to compete with its legendary inspiration.
VanillaBeast Retro Knock-Out! Impressions
What I Like
Fight Mechanics
As you might expect from a game that hews so close to a classic, what worked the first time around remains fun all these years later. The fights in Retro Knock-Out and how to succeed in them will bring on a wave of nostalgia for those old enough to remember Punch-Out and battles with the likes of Glass Joe, Piston Honda, and Soda Popinski. Coming out with a victory either by KO or in a decision following five rounds will involve recognizing the patterns of each opponent and counter-attacking when you spot an opportunity.
It’s hardly the most sophisticated or realistic representation of the sweet science, but the challenge of identifying tells and reacting quickly still holds some enjoyment. Though there are only a few fighters included in the demo, it’s apparent that the windows will get even smaller as you climb the ranks, and you’ll need some impressive hand-eye coordination to beat the top-tier challengers.
Training
In between fights, there are mini-games that serve as the training to get you prepared for your next opponent. The beta demo has only one of these on display, which is a fairly straightforward glimpse of you as your character VanillaBeast (yup, that’s your name) in the gym with your heavily-accented Scottish trainer, UK, in front of the heavy bag.
What follows is a memory game that tasks you with trying to recall a sequence of punches and dodges in the correct order. The percentage of these that you’re successful in remembering will determine how filled your stamina bar will be at the outset of the next fight. It’s not entirely clear what other training mini-games will be included in the full game, though it’s hard not to be intrigued by one that involves sparring with a shark.
What I Don’t Like
Difficulty
While it’s impossible to gauge just how hard to beat each of the 30 parody fighters touted to be included in the release version of the game will ultimately be, the ones who are part of the beta demo have some issues. The first of your adversaries, Fake Jaul, is perhaps somewhat comparable to Glass Joe at the outset of Punch-Out in how blatant he is about tipping off his attacks. However he’s hardly as easy to defeat. This is because of how little damage your punches do to his stamina bar, requiring you to continue hammering Fake Jaul with punches long after it’s become tedious. Even when you finally do send him to the mat, you can expect he’ll rise back to his feet a couple of times — and the slog will be forced to continue over a few rounds.
On the other hand, the next opponent in the beta demo, who’s clearly a parody of “Macho” Man Randy Savage, ramps up the difficulty in a hurry. Your response times will need to be quite a bit faster to dodge the flurries he unleashes, and the patterns are a little trickier to dissect in the heat of battle. Suffice to say, I wasn’t much more than a light warm-up for the Macho Boxer, preventing me from unlocking the beta demo’s mystery opponent (pretty sure it was Tike Myson though).
Sense Of Humor
There’s no accounting for taste when it comes to what makes someone laugh or doesn’t, as what one person finds funny is just as likely to elicit not so much as a chuckle from the next. For better or worse, Retro Knock-Out‘s mind is perpetually in the gutter. The opening cutscene designed to look like pages ripped from a comic book makes this abundantly clear in a strip club scene that teases you to purchase the full game with the prospect of graphic (presumably pixelated) nudity. The objectification of women extends to the ring girls, who the game takes great pains to ensure jiggle in all the right places. What else can you say about a game in which one of the goals is to collect trading cards of a porn star?
Vanilla is a pretty generic tough guy protagonist who doesn’t have much personality beyond hurling nasty quips with a surly attitude. Your trainer, UK, is the kind kilt-wearing Scottish stereotype that might have been funny back when Mike Myers had cornered the market on doing this kind of shtick. But if you find jokes about venereal disease and people saying dirty things in general to be uproarious, you might be a better audience for this game than myself.
Bottom Line
In a culture brimming with reboots and remakes, Retro Knock-Out could fit in rather nicely. If the fight mechanics and the familiar trainer-boxer relationship start to remind you too much of Punch-Out though, the steady stream of profanity throughout will be enough to yank you out of that warm and fuzzy nostalgia pretty quick. The recognition and reaction to patterns from your opponents continues is still an effective framework, though it could be tuned in the game to offer a little less of a challenge.
Any decision as to whether to purchase the full game will likely hinge on how amusing you find the parody characters and the off-color jokes, both of which seemed a little too shallow to me to justify pulling the trigger.
