Knockout Home Fitness

Genre: Boxing / Sports (Exercise) / Music-Rhythm

Players: 1

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Review:

Knockout Home Fitness is a motion-controlled Exercise game with a focus on martial arts movements and making use of Music-Rhythm mechanics. And I’m just gonna’ come out and say it because the comparison is unavoidable – this game is like an off-brand entry in the Fitness Boxing series, which played very similarly and featured a similar presentation. Of course, as I often say, it’s okay for a game to be a copycat so long as it’s a good copycat. So the question is… is this a good copycat?

The visual presentation in Knockout Home Fitness is decent, featuring some nice-looking 3D trainers to guide you as you go through your motions. They’re nice-looking… but not as nice looking as those in Fitness Boxing. Also more bland-looking are the backgrounds, which lack Fitness Boxing’s lively color and motion. The boxers here are all voiced adequately, but it’s nothing truly stand-out.

And then the music… Those who read my reviews of Fitness Boxing and Fitness Boxing 2 will recall that I chided the those games for featuring synth covers of popular songs instead of the songs themselves. Well, this game goes a step farther and uses generic synth exercise music, and I found this soundtrack to be woefully uninspired.

The same goes for the gameplay, I’m afraid. Quite simply, this game doesn’t offer anywhere near the kind of options and variety as the Fitness Boxing games. You can’t customize your workout beyond focusing on a part of your body, can’t unlock new outfits for your trainer, and while Fitness Boxing was far too much of a workout and not enough of an actual game, Knockout Home Fitness feels even more joyless.

The one saving grace I can point to here is that Knockout Home Fitness features a wide range of different martial arts moves to incorporate into your workouts… but this hardly matters when the motion detection is as dumb as a rock, and seems to be reduced to “is the controller moving at the right time? Well, then you must have done the move”. Granted, Fitness Boxing isn’t much better in this regard, but it at least made a better attempt to make your workout feel more interactive.

Of course, with all these comparisons to the Fitness Boxing games, I haven’t even mentioned the elephant in the room – Ring Fit Adventure, which is still undeniably the king of the workout genre on Nintendo Switch because it actually makes a solid effort to make working out actually, you know, fun. So it’s kinda’ sad that Knockout Home Fitness is so clearly trying to compete with the game that’s a distant second in its genre on the Nintendo Switch, and still loses by a mile.

In short, if you’re looking for a great workout game on Nintendo Switch, get Ring Fit Adventure. If you’re looking for another, you might consider getting the Fitness Boxing games. But don’t even bother with Knockout Home Fitness – it’s a pale shadow of the Fitness Boxing games, which themselves aren’t even the best games of their kind.

tl;dr – Knockout Home Fitness is an Exercise game that uses gyroscopic motion control to detect the player performing martial arts moves in much the same way as Fitness Boxing. Or to be more accurate, this game is Fitness Boxing, but without the licensed music, with fewer options, and with less-impressive visuals. In other words, there’s not really any reason to get this game when you can get one of the Fitness Boxing games instead (or even better, Ring Fit Adventure).

Grade: C-

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