The idea of the game is okay, but overall it is incredibly difficult to do anything, and my character generally feels not only under-powered, but seemingly out of my control entirely. The key-combo actions never seem to work when I want them to, whenever I accidentally press the block key it takes like 5 seconds to stop blocking, getting up after getting knocked down takes a seemingly random amount of time, and overall the game feels like a bad NSFW parody of those old clunky WWE games.
Understanding what actions I want to complete during different grapples requires reading the text that appears, which then quickly disappears as the enemy escapes the grapple, so I basically lose any chance to do anything I want. Additionally, whenever I actually successfully read the action I want to complete, actually inputting that key combo doesn't seem to work. Pressing at the same time? Doesn't work. Pressing one at a time? Doesn't work. Holding in the order shown? Doesn't work. Oh wait, spamming those keys randomly made it work????? Why?????
All of the animations take anywhere between 1 second and like 5+ seconds, which makes the game feel extremely slow and clunky. If the animations were faster, then you wouldn't be able to parry, sure, but a game like Punch-Out!! makes it so that the player is fast, the enemies are slow, and PvP makes both players slow, and that felt powerful and like I had control. Like Gabe Newell said in a recent documentary, feedback is fundamental to having fun with a game, and not receiving feedback for your actions (or even receiving feedback way too late) feels awful.
Sometimes things will seemingly work only sometimes at random, like the Dash Attack. If I dash, sometimes I will start running and can slide-kick, but other times I don't, and can't?
Punching requires spamming the button, but somehow it feels really clunky to use. Holding would probably feel a bit better, but I feel like a better solution is to make the punches faster and possibly to add a coyote time to the punches (pressing the button early works, as opposed to just dropping the input entirely). Dunno if this would actually make it more fun, but whatever.
What do the bars at the top mean? The big bar is health, that's for sure, but what about the others? No explanation is given for these.
What do the actions do at the bottom left? S+K equals.... a hand? What does that mean? L+K+J equals.... another hand, but with a different background color??? Okay, so S+K is grapple (which took like a minute of trying every possible combination of pressing/holding those two buttons), and now I can't use it for like 6+ seconds? Why? To prevent spamming? Why should spamming the grapple even be a bad thing? If a spam limit needs to be added, the mechanic is too overpowered and should be nerfed. Grapple should probably be easier to break out of, plus some other things to make it less powerful, more fun, and generally less limiting.
I can't seemingly blacklist/filter for which gender I want the opponent to be. What if I want to be female with a male opponent? What about Female with Futa opponent? What about Male with Female opponent? Sometimes the dice roll means I have to choose an opponent that I do not want to fight against, and although I can just use the Custom Fight option, what about the missions, which have seemingly randomly generated sexes?
And lastly, the escape mechanic isn't fun. Holding the key down doesn't move the bar, spamming it does, but spamming it faster or slower doesn't do a thing. If the mechanic was instead a QTE that required paying attention, or even that you could try to move in an opposite direction than the grapple to escape faster, that would be much better than just pressing J, K, or L occasionally.
Overall, idea is fine (I may be biased though because I don't really care for the fighting game genre, because games like Sifu comes out and only one bad mechanic is needed to make me hate it (the age system that forces replaying old levels and losing abilities just to continue), or Ghost of Tsushima sounds and looks like fun, but isn't on PC), but the execution of said idea is extremely clunky and makes the game so awful to play that I can't play it without raging at the lack of control.