World Championship Boxing Manager 2 Review

Over 30 years on from the release of the original game, a sequel has been released by publishers Ziggurat, this time via a different developer as Mega Cat Studios took over the reins from Goliath Games. In this World Championship Boxing Manager 2 review, I will be detailing whether or not they could live up to the successes of the original game.

World Championship Boxing Manager 2 – Stung Like a Bee

Title: World Boxing Manager 2
Developer: Mega Cat Studios
Publisher: Ziggurat
Players: 1
Genre: Sports, Simulation, Management
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation, Xbox

Gameplay

The core loop of the game is pretty simple. It’s a business management style game almost as much as it is a boxing game as you have to schedule fights, win them to earn money, use that money to train, upgrade facilities, hire staff etc.

In the fights, you have some pretty bare-bones management options with 4 fighting styles and a few recovery options to choose from. You can definitely cost your boxer a fight by choosing the wrong fighting style for them but beyond not being silly there isn’t much that these options can offer from a management perspective.

This is a pretty simplistic gameplay loop that starts off enjoyable but as I played the game more it grew pretty tedious. It didn’t feel like I was actually managing much beyond setting up fights and trying not to tire my fighter out.

Game Modes

There are two gameplay modes on offer in World Championship Boxing Manager 2. The story mode, and career mode. Story mode is an actual story-based mode where you follow the journeys of a number of fighters from boxing history. This mode came off well to begin with but like a lot of things with this game it wore me out by the third storyline as you feel like a bystander a lot of the time.

The story mode hands you great fighters who don’t really need much help to succeed, and occasionally it will just make you lose without telling you which means you may waste resources training the fighter for a match that they’re losing regardless of what you do. Every story boils down to the same repetitive structure, advance to this scheduled fight, advance to the next scheduled fight, win 5 prize fights, advance to the next scheduled fight where you’ll likely lose or be forced to almost lose because the story calls for it, repeat.

The career mode sees you try to start from the very bottom with bad fighters, no money and no facilities as you make your way to the top. While I find the story mode too easy, the career mode has the opposite problem of being too much of a grind. There are a few quality-of-life improvements that I feel could improve this mode but for now, it’s largely hoping you get matched up with fighters you can beat, pouring all your money into minor improvements, and hoping that’s enough to progress upwards.