Lead story
Free online boxing in 3D, in the browser. You throw every punch yourself, left hand or right, against eight of the greatest names in the sport, any of 400+ real boxers, or a friend on the same keyboard. Nothing to download, no account.
The Boxing Game puts the camera where a boxer's eyes are: just behind and above your right shoulder, with the other man close enough to touch. You jab with J, hook with K and dig to the body with L, and the arrow you hold as you punch picks the hand. Slip a punch at the last moment and the fight slows for a beat while you counter. There are no combos to learn and no special moves. The jab still wins rounds, a hook still has to be set up, and a man who shells up behind his gloves can be split with an uppercut or worn down to the body.
The boxers are real. Height and reach decide how far your punches land, and each man's ratings for chin, power, stamina, defence and footwork, the same numbers behind the boxing simulator, decide how much he can take, how hard he hits and how well he slips. In the Title Run you fight eight of them in order, from Shakur Stevenson to Oleksandr Usyk. In a free fight you pick any two from the roster and choose who is in the other corner: the computer at one of four levels, a second player, or nobody at all while you watch two computer boxers go at it.
| Step in, step back | ↑ ↓ or W S |
|---|---|
| Slip left, slip right | ← → or A D |
| Jab, or straight right | J |
| Hook | K |
| Uppercut | ↑ + K |
| To the body | L |
| Guard | hold Space |
| Left hand or right hand | hold ← or → as you punch; with neither, the hands take turns |
| Pause, new fight | Esc, R |
| Player 1, red corner | Player 2, white corner | |
|---|---|---|
| Step | W S | ↑ ↓ |
| Slip, and pick the hand | A D | ← → |
| Jab, hook, body | F G H | , . / or numpad 1 2 3 |
| Uppercut | W + G | ↑ + . |
| Guard | hold E | hold right Shift or numpad 0 |
On a phone or tablet the buttons appear under the ring by themselves: arrows on the left (▲ and ▼ to step, ◀ and ▶ to slip), JAB, HOOK, BODY and GUARD on the right. Hold ◀ or ▶ while you tap a punch to pick the hand; ▲ with HOOK is the uppercut. With a gamepad, press any button once so the browser sees it. The stick or the D-pad steps and slips, X jabs, Y hooks, A goes to the body, B slips and any bumper or trigger is the guard (Square, Triangle, Cross and Circle on a PlayStation pad). Two pads, two players.
Z X C and F G H punch too, if J K L sit badly under your hand; left Shift guards as well as Space.
A fight is one, three or six rounds of 30, 60 or 90 seconds; the default is three one-minute rounds. When a boxer's health runs out he goes down and the referee counts. If it is you on the canvas, mash any punch button to beat the count: every knockdown takes more getting up from than the one before, a good chin makes it easier, and you get up with less left each time. Ten is a knockout. Three knockdowns in the same round and the referee stops it.
If both men are standing at the last bell, three judges have scored every round on the ten-point must system. A clean jab counts one, a body shot one and a half, a hook, straight right or uppercut two, a counter a little more, and a knockdown costs the man who went down a point. The cards give a unanimous, split or majority decision, or a draw, and you see all three at the end. Between rounds the corner gets some of the damage back, never all of it, so the hurt from round one is still there in round three.
You box as a 5 ft 11 in boxer-puncher with a 73-inch reach and good numbers everywhere, and each opponent meets you at his own weight. What changes from one fight to the next is his height and reach, his stance, his style, and how sharp the computer is behind him. Win and the next name comes up; lose and you get him again. Your place on the ladder is kept in your browser.
Set the mode to Free fight and both corners open: any two boxers from the roster, past and present, at any weight. Weight counts for a lot. A heavier man's punches land harder and he takes more to put down, so a dream fight between a bantamweight and a heavyweight goes to the heavyweight every time; tick Even fight to give both boxers the same numbers and leave only height, reach, stance and style. Between two computer boxers of the same level, one rated 95 across the board beats one rated 80 about four times in five: the ratings matter without deciding everything.
The computer comes at four levels. An Amateur reacts in about a third of a second, rarely slips and leaves long gaps between attacks; a Legend reacts in a twelfth of a second, slips nearly half of what it sees coming and punishes almost every miss. Each boxer also fights to his style, so an out-boxer keeps you on the end of the jab and a swarmer walks through it.
In Free fight, set the other corner to Player 2. The screen splits in two and each of you watches the fight from behind your own shoulder, so nobody has to box backwards. The keys are in the table above, and two gamepads work as well, one each. This is local multiplayer only for now: there is no online play against someone on another computer.
The Boxing Game is a boxing browser game. It opens in a tab in Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, on a Windows PC, a Mac, a Chromebook, an iPhone, an Android phone or a tablet. Like the Flash boxing games of the 2000s it needs no install; unlike them it needs no plugin either, because it is drawn in 3D on the browser's own canvas. Once the page has loaded a fight needs no connection, and your settings and your place in the Title Run stay in that browser. For school and office networks there are notes on boxing games unblocked, and for each kind of device on boxing games for mobile and boxing games for PC.
From the same paper as the boxing simulator, which predicts any fight between two real boxers. In the boxing career game you are the fighter, from the amateurs to a world title; in Boxing Manager you pick the fights and argue the purse. The whole shelf is on the free boxing games page, next to a chart of the boxing weight classes.