Aye, aye, aye… The last time I was so bitterly disappointed by a beat ’em up was probably Ultra Vortek on the Atari Jaguar… Ultimate Body Blows looks promising initially, but on further inspection turns out to be a bit of a stinker…

I know this game rates highly among CD32 fans, and developer Team 17 are rightfully legendary, but – honestly… Come on!

Ultimate Body Blows is a stunted, badly-designed fighting game that looked pretty pathetic next to the competition in 1994 when it was first released (console gamers were playing Street Fighter II on the SNES at the time), and now it just looks and feels… amateurish.

It’s not the structure of the game that’s bad, it’s the look and feel of some of the fighters that I think ruins it. Of the 21 available I only found a couple that weren’t annoying, and that didn’t have terrible animation. The moves for each fighter are relatively limited, although every one has a varying number of Special Moves, and one ‘Super Move’.

The graphics in Ultimate Body Blows are quite nice – the backdrops especially. Some of the characters, though, are really poorly drawn. Maria, for example, looks like they left the placeholder art in the game for her and forgot to add in the finished graphics…

Ultimate Body Blows should have been a lot better. With more time given to developing the individual characters, and more care given to the presentation, this could have been quite good. As it stands: it’s one step up from cow muck.

More: Ultimate Body Blows on Wikipedia