Two Weeks with Fitness Boxing 2 for the Switch

My gym shut down back in March; it’s been open intermittingly since then, but in this time of COVID, gyms with all the sweating and heavy breathing are among the worst places to be. During the summer, exercising outside was an option, but now that winter has settled in here in New England, everyone is looking for exercises they can do indoors.

I haven’t played a fitness game on a console since Wii Fit back in the before times. When I saw the demo for Fitness Boxing 2 on the Switch, I downloaded the demo, played it for a few minutes, liked what I saw, and bought the full game.

I promised myself I would give the game two weeks to show me how it could get me moving in the morning. It’s been two weeks 🙂

I feel a workout is doing its job when I’m sweaty and my heart rate is elevated, but not so much that I am gasping for breath. With FB2, I was looking for something I could fit into my day between my morning tea and shower.

FB2 has a variety of routines to accommodate busy lifestyles. Free training routines can take just six minutes. The longer Daily Workouts can take from twenty to forty minutes.

The game has a variety of tricks to keep you playing. First is the calendar; you’ll see the days you played and the days you didn’t. Then there’s the kilocalories burned — the game says I burned almost 660 calories in this half hour workout. That’s wrong; I doubt I burned more than 150, maybe 200. But it’s nice to have a number that can go up. (My phone health app says I spent 203 calories, actually. That number is also fiction, but I believe it is closer to correct).

The most dominant number they give is your “fitness age”, and this is where the game really starts showing its limitations. (The game does inform you that the kcal burned and your fitness age have no relation to what’s actually happening with your body).

I graphed the fitness ages for all my full workouts. I omitted the free training days, as they consistently underreported my true age. The values are all over the place. The R² of the trendline — a measure of how accurately that line reflects the best fit for the points in the scatter plot — is 0, which means it doesn’t describe it at all. In two weeks, the game wasn’t able to tell me if my average fitness age is improving, declining — anything about it.

This is a limitation common to a lot of exercise gear. Fitness trackers, for instance, are almost always complete fiction. I’m wearing one on my wrist right now, and it said I made 2.6K steps during that half hour workout. I didn’t make even one step. But how could it know? The watch is on my wrist, not my ankle. It’s trying to guess if I’m walking from the motion of my left hand.

Similarly, Fitness Boxing 2 has to determine if you’re boxing by measuring the amount of “snap” you give the Switch controllers. It cannot measure if you’re bobbing, ducking and weaving, or if you’re doing a hook or uppercut, or doing a jab instead of a straight. It measures if you “snapped” your punch, and if you did it with the beat, and that’s it.

Your fitness age goes down when you snap the controller to the beat, and up when you miss.

While the game itself can’t tell if you are really boxing, it does a fairly decent job of explaining the various punches and moves so that when you’re in the groove and hitting those beats and snapping those punches, you can feel a little like Rocky, maybe feel a little dangerous.

The gameplay itself is similar to Guitar Hero. Suggested punches scroll up, and you hit them to the beat. The animated instructor is doing the punches as well and constantly reminding you of the beat, shouting encouragement, and letting you know when new punches are coming. I actually found it really helpful and very informative. There is a lot of information on the screen to keep you in the rhythm — and this is, again, very much a rhythm game. If you don’t enjoy them, then you will not enjoy Fitness Boxing 2.

The game itself tracks your progress and each workout is based on your performance in the previous one. Songs unlock as you play, adding more well known songs or faster songs. Punches and combos also unlock; where at the beginning, you start with jab-straight combos, at the end of two weeks, you’ll be getting combos with eight or more punches that must be landed in the rhythm.

Like any exercise, especially a self-directed one like Fitness Boxing 2, you get out of it what you put into it. My goal was to have an excuse to get some exercise in each day. Fitness Boxing 2 fills that role, and has enough pull to keep me playing. The exercises are low/no impact, and when things are going well, you feel like a badass.

Unfortunately, all the numbers they give you that seem related to your health are fiction, and I think it’s a mistake that they are featured so prominently. My son, who was working a forklift at the time, proudly showed me how he was getting 20,000 steps each day on his Fitbit. I don’t know what was happening with the Fitbit, but he for sure wasn’t walking 20,000 steps.

So, my recommendation: If you want a light home daily workout and enjoy rhythm games and like to be inches from destroying an expensive computer monitor with a stray punch, Fitness Boxing 2: Rhythm & Exercise just might be for you. If you’re looking for a video game to tell you anything about your actual health, though, look elsewhere.