All of the usual features for an arcade style beat em up were in there; varying fighters, special moves and differing backgrounds as you progressed through the game.
Now Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat were very good arcade games (And Mortal Kombat ended up being a very good Amiga Game) - could Body Blows go toe to toe or would it be finished off after three short rounds?
Like any good game of this type it offered two modes of play. Single player mode pitted you against the computer (after you had chosen your fighter) making you fight against six increasingly difficult opponents before finally taking on the hardest of them all 'Max'.
Give Max a kicking and your victory was complete.
Multi-player mode with a bunch of friends was also possible, allowing two, four or even eight players to take part in a knockout tournament. Great fun.
In classic arcade fashion (which Commodore gamers were familiar with) each fighter was blessed with a plethora of moves with lots of punches, kicks and flying attacks available to each.
Of course each character had special moves too which could be real fun - see 'Cossack' and his Superdrill move for example.
Another good feature in this game was that it allowed you to put the same characters against each other (which required a cheat in Street Fighter to accomplish) for a real evenly matched battle.
Great combo-attacks could be executed after a fair amount of practice too and huge bonus points were awared for winning a bout without taking a single blow - a perfect victory.
For me as usual you usually ended up with a couple of fighters that you preferred and stuck to those when playing the game.
I remember Max being a real b*stard to beat - I don't think I ever did as far as I remember.
All in all this game was well recieved when it was released. It was a well polished game with decent characters which were nicely drawn (and pretty big), great looking four way scrolling backdrops, nifty in-game speech and great music both in-game and on the title screen.
Some of the special moves were very well done too - the ninja who sort of 'dissolved' into thin air ('Shadow!') was rather cool at the time!
Team 17 were synonymous with quality and they delivered a fine arcade game in the beat em up genre to us Amiga gamers. It perhaps lacked a little soul - but once you got the hang of it this game was well worth playing.
It kept me occupied until MK came out anyway - and was one of the better beat em ups in Commodore gaming history.
The only real downside to the game was the disk swapping and long load times between levels - but we can forgive it that as the game could be played on a standard Amiga 500.
We recommend getting hold of the real Amiga hardware - but if not then download an Amiga emulator and download Body Blows. Alternatively you could try and play it online.
Please see our other Amiga retro game reviews - all links are listed in alphabetical order. Cheers guys
GENRE: Arcade game (Beat em up)
RELEASE DATE: 1993 RELEASED BY: Team 17
DEVELOPER(S): Allister Brimble, Cedric McMillan Jnr, Alex Garnier, Nik Harbor, Daniel J Burke
PRICE: £25.99 (UK)
Classic Arcade Action:
Arcade Games, Classic Games and Amiga Games
2 comments:
I always wish I'd had the full version of this!
Thanks for a nice review of Body Blows. Classic fighting game. While it was good, I've always favoured Street Fighter, Shadow Fighter and Mortal Kombat over it. :) Will have to fire up my Amiga to give it a go soon though after having read the review. :)
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