In April 2018, I got my hand caught in a machine at work and was immediately admitted to the hospital. After two operations, six months of recovery, and learning to reuse my hand, I was finally able to go back to work. Unfortunately, after being cooped up, eating nothing but takeaway and junk food, I put on a lot of weight. Since then, I have always struggled with fitness motivation. As someone who thinks going for a run is boring, video games can be a great source of fitness. While I wouldn’t recommend Knockout Home Fitness being your number one fitness routine, it’s the perfect gateway to staying active.
Knockout Home Fitness advertises its method of everyone having 15 mins to spare each day to be active. Upon opening the game, you are introduced to this system. Every day, you will participate in a 10-20 minute martial arts-related workout. You can even do 30 minutes if you’re feeling adventurous. These workouts are usually broken into segments to give you a little break in between. You can only participate in a personal training session once per day. However, players can select their own three to five-minute routine as many times as they want.
“Courses can be quite intense.”
Knockout Home Fitness separates workouts into five categories; Warm-up, Boxing, Kickboxing, Fight and Challenge. Every workout also lists the focus areas, and approximately how many kilocalories you burn. This allows you to plan your workouts to target certain areas or burn enough calories. With over 50 workouts and each one being over 3 minutes long, there is plenty of content available to enjoy.
The courses in Knockout Home Fitness are also incredibly enjoyable — Who would have thought fitness could be fun? Every segment combines dance music with your martial arts movements, resulting in a vigorous workout.Â
Knockout Home Fitness courses can also be quite intense. This can lead to you slowing down and missing key moves, especially if you’re starting to get tired. Fortunately, if you make the wrong action, you can sometimes get away with it. Although, occasionally, you can be on the receiving end of some random strikes registering. While this isn’t ideal, it’s much better to be forgiving than super strict.
After the first few days of starting my fitness routine, my body was aching. Fortunately, the idea of coming back every day for a short workout kept my interest. After a week, my body began to hurt less. Knockout Home Fitness keeps track of your daily workouts with a fitness report, so you receive a stamp for every day you finish.
“Knockout Home Fitness knows what it is and does it well.”
Adding to the incentive of coming back every day are the unlockables. However, they aren’t quite as good as they first seem. Initially, I was excited to unlock new trainers, but after trying them out, they aren’t something to look towards. You do unlock workouts and songs as well, but a bit more content would have been a welcome addition. The only positive is that you do unlock these organically by playing but some sort of achievement hunting would have been nice.
Knockout Home Fitness knows what it is and does it well. Even though I have stopped using the game now as my sole fitness game, it has inspired me to stay active. For the price of AU $59.95, it might be hard to justify spending the money on the game if you are already quite active. Although, for someone who needs to be more active, this could be the perfect game to kickstart your healthy habits.
Knockout Home Fitness is available on Nintendo Switch now.
*Disclaimer: Reviewed on Nintendo Switch, code was provided by the Publisher.
