The picture taking is simple, just choose an opponent then choose face and skin and a picture of a boxer with a blank face shows up on the screen. Point the camera, position the face, press the left soft key on your phone and voila! The facial filter and body filter allow you to change the pigment of your chosen boxer. The photomapping also works with photographs so if there’s some distasteful picture in your workplace you can go at it!
As you can see, another nice feature of Photo Boxing is the damage you can inflict during the fight. Bruises, cuts, bloody noses and black eyes appear on your opponents face with each punch to his head. Too bad you can’t knock his mouthpiece flying. But the fighters reactions to head shots, uppercuts and body blows are very nice and the flying KO’s are definitely satisfying. When you’re hit the screen turns blood red. Your opponents put up a good fight dodging and blocking and forcing you to probe at their defenses and choose the correct punch to throw.
The controls are a little awkward in this quick play game. You punch to the head with 1(left) and 3(right) and use 4 and 6 for body blows. The 5 key is for uppercuts. This is all fine, but when you get to the tougher opponents you’ll need to block and dodge some of their blows which is accomplished with the joystick/d-pad. Up blocks head shots while down blocks body blows with left and right dodging. Sometimes you’ll wish you had a third hand.
Technobubble advertises a learning AI as you fight through a World Tournament where the opponents get progressively tougher. The bouts are a best of three with no second chances. If you lose you have to start the tournament over. Another mode is knockout where you fight through as many boxers as you can for a score which you can post online. There is also multiplayer via Bluetooth which adds another dimension to Photo Boxing 3D.
Photo Boxing 3D has nice music and good sound FX that gets your adrenaline going as the bell rings and the crowd cheers you on. Each punch that connects elicits thumps and groans to further draw you into the fight.
Although Photo Boxing 3D is not a long or particularly deep game it combines a good boxing engine with unique photomapping technology, nice graphics, animation and sound to make a worthy 4 star game for your mobile device.
Reviewed by Glenn - Nokia N73