Review by: Meghan Watt

With a few entertaining additions and a new cast of cartoony celeb look-alikes, Ready 2 Rumble Revolution should have been able to return to the ring as a reigning champ. But amidst the new boxing modes, character creation and other welcome add-ons, the developer forgot one key element: playability.

Most Wii games require that you stand and flail your arms like a fool. That's perfectly okay when you get a fun experience in exchange but this new installment of Midway's arcade-style boxing game simply fails to respond to most Wiimote waggling. The tutorial will have you believe that swinging the Wiimote and Nunchuk this way and that will perfectly execute a series of dodges, blocks, jabs and hooks.

Yet when you enter your rookie creation into the championship, you'll soon find that the Wii couldn't care less how viciously you jostle the controller. Either your furious jabbing won't register or the Wii will mistake it for something else entirely and when timing and precision are central to victory, your boxer won't make it out of the gym.

If unreliable controls were R2R's only flaw, you could throw this in the bin with all of the other fun but defunct Wii titles. But when you add repetitive mini-games, half-hearted celebrity mock-ups and last generation graphics the game is nothing more than a big K.O.

When charging through the championship solo, your boxing boy needs to partake in several training sessions to beef up his stats. There are eight varieties of training that he can do three times in between each match. To earn the championship title, he must pummel his way through 29 contenders. Assuming he has to try each match twice in order to win – and no, he won't be so lucky – that adds up to 174 of the same few mini-games. You see the point.

Like its year 2000 predecessor, R2R also throws in a few celebrity caricatures including Brad Pitt (as he appeared in Snatch), Jack Black in a school uniform (presumed to be from School of Rock), a toothy Shaun White and others. If you can tell who each knock-off is, then kudos. Personally, I only spotted Willem Dafoe, and he's not even on the list of facial likenesses.