CREED: RISE TO GLORY
After a mere ten minutes of play, this game delivers the Rocky thrills you are hoping for as you’re pushed into a training montage ahead of your first fight. The stirring strings and helium vocals of Gonna Fly Now rise as you punch the bags and hit the treadmill, with your surly coach egging you on to give more to the cause. Inside the PS VR headset, it feels great. The artsy right side of my brain is having a smashing time wallowing in the Rocky atmosphere, but my logical left side has to barge in and break up the love-in: “Can Creed: Rise To Glory stay the course?” it questions. Oh fudge, no, no it can’t is the reality.
The main career mode lasts around two hours, but can go a little longer if you play on a higher difficulty setting. While it lasts, like much of Creed, it’s brilliant fun. The story puts you in the gloves of raw amateur Adonis Creed and sets you on a journey to the top (just like in the film of the same name). Getting there has some fun twists and creative moments: for example, there’s a flashback to a back alley fight against ‘Mad Dog’ Pono after Creed is kicked out of a club. Best of all is a brilliant montage fight against ‘Pretty’ Rick Conlan in which you need to go the distance (again, just like in the movie); rounds crash into one another with no break leaving you physically exhausted by the final bell. As the song goes, “It’s getting hard now”.
But it’s all over far too soon, and these moments are too few. The bulk of the story drifts between training montages and fights, and after six of these the credits roll, leaving you feeling a little deflated. The game took me so high, promised so much, and left the ring leaving me wanting more.
DOWN, NOT OUT
That’s not to say Creed: Rise To Glory isn’t fun while it lasts. It offers a great virtual reality boxing experience. The game uses what Survios calls its ‘Phantom Melee Technology’ to deliver a genuinely physical experience. When punches land you can feel them in the PS Move controllers, and there’s a real sense of achievement when you dodge a combo and successfully counter with a flurry of your own. The faster your swings, the harder your punches, but learning combos is essential to success on higher difficulty settings.
Advanced controls enable you to move slowly around your opponent by holding the PS Move controllers’ buttons and waving your hands one over the other like Daffy Duck demanding you ‘put ’em up’. (Honestly, it feels better in PS VR than it sounds.)
While mechanically Creed delivers a solid-feeling VR boxing sim, it does lack the deeper tactical play of,
“ROUNDS CRASH INTO ONE ANOTHER, LEAVING YOU PHYSICALLY EXHAUSTED.”