Let’s Get Ready To Manaaaaage!
March 1st marked the 9 year anniversary of the Fight Night Champion release and with it the 9 year anniversary of the last major boxing release on consoles. Fans of the sweet science have been starving for attention since then, with EA moving on to UFC and 2K dropping out after one lackluster edition of Prizefighter. In steps Leather: Tactical Boxing Management, an iOS/Android boxing sim from Hitsunk Games.
First things first, you will not be directly controlling the fighters in the ring. If that’s what you are looking for, unfortunately, the search continues. If you are looking for a deep and engaging sim where you recruit, train, and guide the careers of young pugilists from their first fight to retirement, then this is the game for you. Leather starts off with you naming your gym and selecting your starting funds, anywhere from $50k to $1 billion. From there it’s off to recruitment where you will negotiate contracts with signing bonuses and fight percentage cuts with as many fighters as you like from any weight class. Also at this point, you can hire coaches, who are paid monthly, to help sharpen your fighters’ skills, but more on that later.
My gym page lists fighters, their fitness level and their current schedule
Once you have your gym setup it’s time to fight! You go to the rankings and have the choice of challenging fighters ranked 1-4 spots ahead of you. If they accept, you’ll train, fight and move up or down depending on the result. If they decline you swap spots in the rankings with that fighter with no change in record. You continue like this, moving up and down the ranks, winning titles (there are 3 per weight class), losing them, winning them back, etc. until it’s time for your fighter to retire. Simple enough yes? Well not quite, there’s quite a bit of strategy along the way and if you do a poor job managing your boxer’s career you may never hit those highs and the lows will have you begging your fighter to retire or dismissing them from your gym altogether.
Step 1 in taking a promising amateur and molding them into the next GOAT is hiring coaches. Coaches are recruited in the same way as fighters and have their own ratings that determine how well they pass along their knowledge. Every fighter has 14 ratings (1%-100%) governing their in-ring ability: stamina, dexterity, agility, reflexes, hand speed, strength, toughness, footwork, cunning, guarding, jab, cross, hook, and uppercut. Coaches have the same ratings plus 3 more: dogmatism, judgment, and tenacity (the game provides a detailed description of each attribute in its help section). You can assign multiple coaches to each fighter and their development (or lack thereof) will depend on the blend of skills in the coaching staff you’ve assembled.
Boxer profile featuring attributes, record and tale of the tape.
Once you have your staff and you’ve scheduled a fight, it’s time for training camp. In camp, you select one attribute per week to improve or you can rest to get your fighter’s fitness back to 100%. Week to week training starts off by giving +4% to whatever attribute you choose and will slowly decrease to 1% as your career goes on and your fighter improves. Now that you’re prospect has been receiving expert coaching and has gone through their first grueling training camp you’re finally ready to get in the ring and put it all into action.
Coaching stats
At the start of the fight, you have the option of using a stock gameplan or putting together your own custom strategy. The in-ring strategy consists of instructions for any and all situations and can be changed round to round depending on how the fight is going. You decide if you want your fighter to stay on the outside flicking his jab and moving away from his opponent or get in close and throw combinations to keep the pressure on. You can set stance, preferred range, whether you want to target the body or head, punch output, punch selection, what to do after throwing (IE move in, throw a quick combination and move back out of range), what to do when your opponent throws, what to do when either fighter is hurt, and you can customize each of these settings for long, mid and close range.
It all sounds pretty complex, and on one hand it is, but it’s wrapped in a very intuitive interface and never feels overwhelming. During the fight, you’ll get a simple top-down representation of the in-ring action while the rest of the screen tracks head/body health, energy and injuries for both fighters along with punch stats and what can best be described as momentum meters. The game even features different ring sizes and referees with varying tolerances for clinching and injuries to give you unique experiences fight to fight.
I’ve covered the main mechanics in some detail and still haven’t touched on all the features Leather offers. Fighters will hit attribute caps due to struggles making weight, you can change divisions, each fighter will hit their prime/decline at different ages, other gyms can jump in and steal promising recruits (so if you see a fighter you really like you better up the initial offer). Leather gives you every tool you need to play out whatever kind of career you want. You can carefully select safe opponents and protect your best fighters all the way up the chain or you can have a take on all comers mentality and just hope for the best.
Gym rankings
Whatever story you want to tell, you can. Maybe the best part of Leather is you can tell these different stories in the same gym. I started my current gym with two fighters, a middleweight name “The Encounter” Eliseo Alberto Michel (you can edit the names of all the fighters but if you don’t the game will generate a nickname for you once you’ve earned it) he’s 14-0 with 11 knockouts and ranked 20th in the world. He’s going to be middleweight champion one day, he might end up in the hall of fame, he’s the one who keeps the lights on. The other was Tung Trong Nhan, a heavyweight prospect from Vietnam with good strength and a killer cross.
I had high hopes for Nhan, but he started his career getting knocked out in the first round by a journeyman named Mitsuto Kaoru. I said that was a lucky punch, let’s run it back and the second time he was knocked out in round 2. I was discouraged but I thought no way this guy beats Nhan 3 times! Nhan went down in round 1 and I had to give tell him maybe boxing wasn’t for him. I advised him to retire but he refused, 0-3 with 3 losses by knockout, I didn’t want this guy associated with my gym so I went to fire him and he told me I had to write him a check for nearly $500,000 as a buyout of his 5-year contract. I told Nhan I’d see him tomorrow and he better be ready to work. We left Kaoru behind and Nhan has reeled off 10 straight (handpicked) knockout wins.
Nhan continues his win streak with an early-round stoppage due to injury.
He’ll probably never win a title, he’s certainly not the fighter Eliseo is or even some of the newer recruits, but Nhan is an example of what makes Leather a memorable and engaging experience. Each fighter is unique and you have to know your guys inside and out to get where you want to go and unlike other, more generic career modes, that place isn’t always under the bright lights with millions of fans watching. I give Leather an enthusiastic BUY for boxing fans and sim/management fans alike.