Knockout 2: Wrath of the Karen

I played the everloving [$!$!] out of Punch-Out, and if you enjoyed that then you WILL enjoy this. The format builds on what Punch-Out invented, and it's AWESOME. It's still in early access, and for me personally the game freezes quite often, however even the current product was well worth my money. [spoiler] I beat Harold and Gerald on almost max settings (Smelling Salts at 0.25x to make the fight possible), and I'm preeetty sure nobody else has ever done that before. So if being better than me is some encouragement...go wild. [/spoiler] The gear system is pretty cool, although it does feel somewhat lacking in coolness when it comes to the crappier items. Also play Election Year Knockout too. That game is similarly cool.

Great game, if you like mike tyson punch-out - buy it. A lot of replayability. Also pretty funny writing.

This game reminded me of the old school Punchout game on Nintendo, where you are putting up your dukes! This game is SO FUN. Dialogue has some pretty hilarious writing, animation is also great, and story progression and the villainous Karens get harder.

It's a simple, fun Punch-Out!!-like game where you face a bunch of "Karens" (and other stereotypes) who weasel in any advantage they can while you yourself are a clean, by-the-book boxer. Even if you beat the main campaign, there's a challenge mode ("Missions") where you can customize the fights to your liking, or face some rotating preset missions, so there is definitely a replayability factor. There's a free demo and the game is relatively lightweight (1.59 GB for the demo). It even runs on my dinosaur toaster from 2009, so you have no reason not to at least give it a go.

I absolutely adore this game, but in my opinion it has one major issue: the final boss fight. Spoiler warning for the tentacle lady boss. The fight itself is interesting, and I don’t mind dying while learning mechanics through trial and error. Eventually, you figure out how to get her tentacles tangled so you can actually damage her and push her into a lower health state. That part felt fair enough. My problem starts when you finally get her health down to zero. You keep attacking her, only for her to suddenly heal back up. Then it happens again. I eventually had to look up what I was doing wrong and discovered that you’re supposed to use the super punch to progress the fight. That part is somewhat on me for not realizing it sooner, but after that the mechanics become even less clear. From what I understand, after using the super punch you’re supposed to perfectly dodge her giant hand slam, gain another charge from that, and then super punch her again to finally win. The issue is that the game doesn’t communicate this very well at all, and I could never consistently tell if I was even doing it correctly. Another big problem is that I genuinely cannot seem to get the second super…

Knockout Kings 2 is actually a pretty fun game for about 5 minutes at a time. After that, I find myself getting bored with the gameplay loop and the grind. But before I dive into that, what exactly is Knockout 2? Aside from being the sequel to Knockout? It’s a simple arcade boxing game where you take the role of an agent from the Bureau of Federal Boxing Investigation. We are told that the country is facing many threats, which is where this game's humor starts coming into play. Anyway, the world is under threat from all types of Karens. Armed with our fists and a set of used gloves, we take to the grocery store or gym, and sometimes a call center, to take out these Karens. The game is best with a controller, which Steam tells you before you get into the game. But I decided to play with a keyboard and mouse, primarily a keyboard. The game controls fine, and frankly, looks great. It just couldn’t hold my attention. I found no joy in grinding for money, and while the jokes were funny, the whole cast is made up of stale characters. There was nothing to keep me here, not even the gameplay loop. Knockout Kings 2 works amazingly on the Steam Deck, which is where I was playing befo…