With candy and food holidays coming up like Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, it may be a good time to beef up your fitness routine.  Maybe with a video game?  This exercise game takes many cues from Nintendo’s own Fitness Boxing series and adds martial arts moves, kicks, and stances into the mix.  Choose a virtual trainer and do daily routines once per day, or try exercises that are around 3 minutes in length anytime you want.  You can also track your progress on the calendar.

To play, you’ll hold a JoyCon in each hand and time your punches, blocks, and other moves to the beat of the music.  A meter on the bottom screen will tell you when to do certain moves and which hand to do them with.  Try to stay with the beat and not miss to get a better score.  After two or three of these workouts and you’ll be done for the day, but you can also do unlocked workouts any time you want, and view your progress and edit stats.

This game is really just a lesser version of Fitness Boxing.  You have four trainers and four studios to choose from, with some needed to be unlocked by playing.  The music is just generic techno.  The game adds kicks as well as punches, but since you don’t have a leg strap or anything they just automatically give those to you as hits when you play.  My main problem with this game is that the icons for the moves are on the bottom of the screen, with both left and right moves in the same place with text instead of pictures to tell you what to do.  And it can be hard to distinguish that in the heat of things.  Fitness Boxing did it better by having the icons be picture cues on the left and right sides of the screen.  Knockout Home Fitness is still fine for what it is, but if you want a REALLY good fitness game, I say get Ring Fit Adventures.

Kid Factor:

Nothing violent or objectionable here, although reading skill is helpful for some of the text.  Knockout Home Fitness is rated E for Everyone.

Tags: Game Reviews