Rumble Roses just isn't shallow enough.
Konami have watered down the template the babes from Dead or Alive set for them. All we have here is chesty women with bolted on stereotypes in typically shallow gameplay mimicking (bad) soft-porn. So for those, like me, who can revel in the very idea of Rumble Roses, the novelty is ruined very quickly. And for those who wanted a seriously good wrestling game - who were you trying to kid?
As for the women of Rumble Roses, you can see the trend of similarities from other games. Bloody Shadow, for instance, has the whiff of Taki from Soul Calibur to her, while Reiko resembles Jun from Tekken. Then, there's the bloody gimmicks. Storylines in wrestling take inspiration from soap operas and work well because of gimmicks. Konami, however, rewind back ten years and uses the word a little too literally. You've got a naughty nurses, a prim teacher who's also a dominatrix, a punk student, a cowgirl, a showgirl and a ninja. These gimmicks somewhat ruin the novelty and, quite strangely, try to make the game seem serious when it really can't be.
There's no need for a story in a game like this but in the name of silliness you've got one. Each girl enters the Rumble Roses tournament for personal reasons: Candy Cane wants to raise money for the orphanage she grew up in, while her teacher Miss Spencer wants to haul her truant ass back to school; Reiko wants to live up to her late Mother's great name while a cowgirl who's a fan of the legendary Kamikaze Rose wishes to spar with her idol's daughter.
Anesthesia, the saucy nurse with overt lesbian tendencies, hatches a plan to extract the DNA of female wrestlers to create a robot powerful enough to take over the world... a definition of camp is something so ridiculous and so serious at the same time. Rumble Roses' attempt at storytelling seems like both, but is just laughably implausible of anything. Even for wrestling standards.
The closest thing you'll get to a scene out of something like Mean Girls is in the shape of feisty Aisha, who's decidedly modelled on Beyonce (but tragically looks more like Jodie Marsh). She struts onto the scene with the determination to confront her old time rival from high school, Dixie Clemets, and damn, that girl wants to whoop her ass good. Providing some amusing put downs in the game, Aisha's story - when it doesn't tie in with the silly overall plot - is the most entertaining one in there.
By now Rumble Roses fate is already sealed. But to do a game proper justice, let us continue with the review. The gameplay suffers from a severe lack of variety and feels more like a (s)brawl fest than an actual wrestling one. Exhibition matches are limited to normal fights, championship fights and, OH yes, mud matches! Predictably they're all short lived pleasures and especially in the mud matches, thanks to dead-pan effects of the mud and simplistic style of wrestling. It's also where Rumble Roses, on par with the degenerates to a very perverted level indeed.
Submission moves. The game's abreast with them. At first the vast amount of submissions strike as original; a few more plays and it's exposed through the seedy camera angles that they are in fact only in place to lure the gamer's eyes onto specific body parts of the women, or revel when some of the moves renders them into... uncompromising positions. I should have sussed it sooner, seeing as each girl is equipped with a Humiliation Move - one being where your opponent has her legs stretched wide apart, no less. With the submission moves executed in mild fashion (all you have to do is button bash until the number reaches zero), a cold perversity dawns as Rumble Roses enters a far more sleazy plane. The exploitation and voyeurism is just creepy.
Aside from this, the actual wrestling is mostly unoriginal, with moves being borrowed from other wrestling games. Which, I suppose, is predictable seeing as Yukes, developers of the Smackdown! series, lend a hand here. There's no distinctive strengths and weaknesses to the women either, making everything repetitive and uneven. In the ring everything is pretty restrained: the camera angle is predictably zoomed in for maximum erotic effect, while there's only the ringside to take the fight to if the wrestling mat gets a bit samey for you. And if you're thinking about getting hardcore, then Rumble Roses offers you the chance to beat your foes with oars and whips. That's just worrying.
Over in the mud section, it's rightfully over-the-top but annoyingly not as fun as it should be. Mud seems to slip off the women's bodies while the effects are grainy - camera effects such as the mud splurging over the screen is ignored for sheer transparency (mud doesn't stick in this case). As a result, what should be shallow and harmless fun is just empty and disappointing.
Graphically the girls of Rumble Roses set a benchmark for polygon use and whatever the personal preference as to the appearance of the women, things are technically fine. Girls animate properly and absorb most of your attention (obviously) but I couldn't help but feel that some of the girls - particularly Reiko, Makoto and Aigle - sort of looked the same facially. Bodies of the characters are also strangely shaped the same way, which seems to me like a half-baked job from the developers. And in the cutscenes from the story mode, animation tends to be painfully wooden. However, the highlight is undoubtedly each girl's entrance: Aisha does a bootylicious dance, Anesthesia phallicly licks a thermometer before placing it inbetween her breasts and Bloody Shadow appears on a giant toad, I kid you not. It's one of the more fun things about the game, giving the girls some distinction. Everything else in Rumble Roses trips up, visually; surroundings are flat and clipping problems arise when in the ring where the characters don't connect with anything but each other - it's as if Konami put no thought into everything else and focused on the concept of two hot women duking it out. And yeah, Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater is an epic game - but the endless banners across the arenas is just shameless.
Aurally things are a mixed bag. While not much praise can be given to the sound effects or the music - Aisha's an R&B soultress gyrating to synth-led J-Pop while Candy Cane's smart ass routine is tainted by an awful punk track - the voice acting must come under fire. I particularly recommend the voice actress for Anesthesia to be fed to the lions. Basically Anesthesia, the biggest minx in the game, is an Australian thirty year-old trying her best to sound like an American thirteen year-old. Fed sappy dialogue that sure ain't camp but artificially criminal (FYI: kittenish purrs are so unsexy), be prepared for this character to grate. Evil Rose's robotic tone and the excruciating Miss Spencer's Bree Van De Kamp-on-prozac tone will also inspire vitriol. Since Rumble Roses only revolves around the aesthetics, I promise you wouldn't be missing anything if you permanently hit mute throughout playtime.
Rumble Roses ultimately melts in its own sexuality - and not in a sensual way. Without the **** backbone the nature of the game needs to be both entertaining and enjoyable, Rumble Roses drinks the poisoned chalice the Dead Or Alive babes learned with their volleyball hobby - on its own, sex doesn't (always) sell video games. Yes, for a couple of nights Rumble Roses is entertaining but it shoots its load prematurely, hardly leaving you craving for more rather than contemplate the meaning, or lack of it, afterwards. Avoid and remain with the Divas of WWE: trashy women who are shallow enough to be entertaining.