Chavez is a boxing game for the Super Nintendo. It is a fairly simple game where the player needs to strategically think about how/where they are going to punch in order to successfully break the guard of the opponent. While simple, there is a lot of depth to this system and it's pretty enjoyable to play. Chavez is the Latin American release of the game Riddick Bowe Boxing and is essentially the same game but featuring Latin boxers. The whole game is in Spanish (which I do not remember much from high school lol).
The career mode has the player create a boxer and allocate their stat points. I found that a slight favoritism to power worked out pretty well. I was then placed at 25th in the leaderboards and tasked with defeating the other 24 boxers to become the champion! You see the next opponent’s stats before fighting them and they will be much higher than the player for a while, but they also don’t seem to matter a ton.
The gameplay is pretty strong and very tactical. Everything seems to be binary. There are high/low punches, left/right punches, and strong/weak punches. Additionally, there is an upper cut that deals a ton of damage. Each player has both a fatigue bar and a health bar. They will be knocked out when the fatigue bar goes all the way to zero and the health bar determines how much fatigue is taken per hit and how fast it recovers. It essentially works the same as Sekiro. Additionally, the head and body have separate health bars.
I had two general tactics. The first was to punch at the head, see which side the opponent would put their guard up, and then punch on the other side. This required extremely quick reflexes and didn’t work too often for me. However, when it did work, Chavez felt like a rhythm game and I would pull off massive combos. My second strategy was to do left/right alternating, strong, body punches. This was rarely ever blocked by the opponent and could pummel through their health. After a bit, I would also throw in some upper cuts for massive damage.
Every 5 rankings seems to be the cutoff for difficulty. Boxers 24-20 don’t put up too much of a challenge, but then the difficulty spikes like crazy for boxer 19. I was able to get down to 15th, but it became too much to try and take the 14-10 boxers with my stats. They moved incredibly fast and started to stun lock me the second I came in range of them.
In addition to career mode, there is a free play mode. In this mode, you can play as any of the characters in the roster and fight against any character. I obviously had to do some Chavez mirror matches. I lost twice trying that, but it was always a close fight. I was able to beat any character up to rank 4-5 handily as Chavez. It makes me think that he just has incredible stats because that is 10 whole ranks higher than what I could deal with in career mode. I also did some curb stomping of rank 25 as Chavez. That was pretty hilarious.
Overall, Chavez (which is I guess Riddick Bowe Boxing) is a pretty solid boxing game for the SNES. I appreciate that the player needs to think out each match and the gameplay is generally fun. The graphics/sound are nothing to write home about, but the giant sprites of each boxer are really cool. I don’t know that I would go out recommending this to many people but it is worth picking up and spending a couple hours with if someone likes boxing games. Buy Riddick Bowe though because Chavez was much more expensive and rare. (5/10)
