Chiki-Chiki Boxy Pro Wrestling review

With last year’s Chiki-Chiki Boxy Racers, Orgesta reached into gaming’s golden past, offering a breezy title inspired by titles like R.C. Pro-Am, Micro Machines, and Choro Q. With the release of Chiki-Chiki Boxy Pro Wrestling, the Osaka-based developer delivers another voxel-based, breezy interpretation of a popular pastime. Eschewing the light simulation often found in many modern franchises, Boxy Pro Wrestling is a throwback to the kind of quick and accessible action once found in NES titles like Pro Wrestling.

Thirty-years of industry development means that contemporary players likely wouldn’t be satisfied with barebones play modes. Head into the Boxy Pro Wrestling’s single player-based Grand Slam and a roster of unlockable contestants can take on a succession of seven tournaments. Each of these competitions offer a bit of variety as you take on opponents in one-on-one matches, tag-team bouts, and even battle royales.

Before jumping into the ring, you’ll undoubtedly want to delve into the game’s tutorial, which imparts most of the fundamentals. Here, you’ll discover that that Boxy Pro Wrestling adopts a simplistic and stylized approach to the sport. Wrestlers have a constrained moveset, intended for control that can scale down to a single Joy-Con. This works great if you have six competitors gathered around a Switch but can be a disappointing for soloists seeking a bit of sophistication.

In execution, that means that attacks differ if the analog stick is centered, pushed in a direction, or your wrestler is jumping. Button mashers will look busy, their character’s appendages flailing about. But having elementary gaming knowledge about execution, timing, and attack range means you’ll probably effortlessly punish, pummel, and pin both human and CPU opponents. The latter are especially weak in larger matches. Given the game’s emphasis of succinct, timed matches, you can often win by just avoiding confrontation, letting your rivals trash about on each other.

That’s not to say there’s imbalance baked into the game. Although wrestlers have distinct moves and stats, variance is more aesthetic that tangible. Contenders can perform specific moves like elbow drops, sleepers, or Boston crabs, but it’s contingent on what part of the body you are closest too and reveals little difference when it comes to effectiveness. That’s not to say Boxy Pro Wrestling isn’t fun. Competitions are enjoyable, but are shallow, especially over the long haul.

Remarkably, Boxy Pro Wrestling has little interest in reality. Matches are sporadically set in outlandish locales, with wild animals threatening to stampede anyone outside the ring or ice that can appear in arctic contexts. Power-ups regularity appear on the periphery, offering a boost in strength or restoration of health that can produce an upset victory. While the game provides eight slots for character creation adds defeated champions to your roster, don’t expect too much depth. Some will bemoan the absence of any kind of GM mode where you can watch your wrestlers duke it out. But, the Chiki-Chiki Boxy games reference a time before games like Baseball Simulator 1.000 introduced managerial aspects.

A robust multiplayer component seems to substantiate this decision. Beyond local play for up to six participants, there’s online competition as well. Those seeking to settle rivalries between acquaintances can do so with number-protected rooms, or you can opt to duke it with strangers. Although I could only muster up a group of four competitors, a series of Battle Royal matches were properly boisterous, offering the kind of heated rivalries that any respectable wrestling game should generate.

Chiki-Chiki Boxy Pro Wrestling was played on
Switch with review code provided by the publisher