Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer review: No punch back

Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer is the latest installment in Imagineer’s exercise game series. Once again published by Nintendo, this entry offers new workouts and instructors for Switch owners looking to get active. It accomplished its goal of getting me moving, but feels underwhelming as a fitness video game.

Break a sweat

Fitness Boxing 3 offers a variety of ways to get active. Daily Workouts are at the center of the experience, walking the player through a warm up, boxing-based workout, and some stretching to cool down. There are also a handful of opportunities to catch your breath, where the instructor will suggest you drink some water. Daily Workouts are tracked on a calendar that shows off your consistency and progress. You can also share your specific workout goals, and the game will tune the workout to fit your needs.

If players want something less structured, Fitness Boxing 3 also offers Free Training and co-op workouts. Every exercise is labeled by which area of the body it targets (i.e. biceps, chest, calves, etc.). This is an excellent feature that empowered me to focus on the parts of my body I most wanted to see improvement in.

As someone looking to be more active on a daily basis but can’t always make it to the gym, Fitness Boxing 3 makes it easy to squeeze in a half-hour workout before I start my work day. The BMI feature and stat tracker also made it simple to follow my progress over time. This information can be password-protected for users who share a console.

Punch it up

While Fitness Boxing 3 succeeded at making me break a sweat, it reminded me of the exercise DVDs my parents would buy in the 2000s. That is to say, it hardly feels like a “game” at all. The best fitness games, especially ones made for Nintendo consoles, go the extra step to gamify just about every aspect of working out, offering immersive activities and almost tricking the player into burning calories for fun. Fitness Boxing 3 hardly even tries to do this. The game’s sterile aesthetic and generic icons and menus make it far less pleasant to use daily than something like Ring Fit Adventure or even Wii Fit.

Furthermore, Fitness Boxing 3’s motion tracking is quite poor. Workouts are treated like rhythm games where you’re scored based on the timing of your punches. However, I’d frequently lose my cadence and throw a punch considerably early or late, only for the game to give me a “Perfect” anyway. Not only did this make it difficult to maintain my rhythm, it also completely takes the wind out of the scores and leaderboards feature.

The presentation issues extend to the stilted animations and dialogue of the titular fitness trainer, who guides you through most of your work out. Even the music feels underwhelming, and I resorted to just using Spotify after a couple of exercises.

Cool down

While the best fitness games are designed for people who play video games, Fitness Boxing 3 feels like it was made for non-gamers who may happen to have a Switch in their home. Sure, it gets you moving, but there’s not much there to make the idea of exercising first thing in the morning remotely appealing.

This review is based on a Switch code provided by the publisher. Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer launches on December 5, 2024 for the Nintendo Switch.

Donovan Erskine

News Editor

Donovan is a journalist from Maryland. His oldest gaming memory is playing Pajama Sam on his mom's desktop during weekends. Pokémon Emerald, Halo 2, and the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 were some of the most influential titles in awakening his love for video games. After interning for Shacknews throughout college, Donovan graduated from Bowie State University in 2020 with a major in broadcast journalism and joined the team full-time. He is a huge film fanatic and will talk with you about movies and games all day. You can follow him on twitter @Donimals_