Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer Review – Exercise, Gamified

Getting into a regular, high-quality exercise routine can be daunting at the best of times. For a newcomer, there’s nothing worse than stepping into a gym for the first time, unfamiliar with the equipment and left feeling like there’s an insurmountable hill to climb.

That’s why Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer can be more than just a fun distraction, but a really useful tool for those looking to get into a more regular exercise cadence without diving straight into the deep end. It cleverly gamifies exercise in a way that makes targets achievable and tangible, plus giving you a good workout in the meantime.

In many ways, Fitness Boxing 3’s presentation reminds me a lot of the Nintendo DS classic, Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training. Each day you clear a workout you get a stamp on your calendar to visualize your progress, and there are smaller, bite-sized daily tasks if you’re short on time but want to keep your streak alive.

But crucially, Fitness Boxing 3 has very in-depth metric tracking to let you know exactly how things are going. The game requests your physical data as you boot up for the first time, which then can calculate your calories burned and your ‘fitness age’, akin to your brain age from Brain Training. It’s a really handy way of tangibly seeing your progress, unlike real-life exercise where you can sometimes feel like you’re just stretching into the void.

As the game’s title suggests, the main exercise you’ll do is boxing drills, melded to the beat of high-octane songs to keep you constantly moving. You begin with just regular straight punches and jabs before evolving onto more complex routines, and can incorporate other activities like seated workouts and mitt training to keep things fresh as you wish. It goes through the whole exercise loop, starting with a brief warm-up to get the blood pumping and extended stretching cooldowns to ensure you don’t injure yourself.

Your main loop is punching to the rhythm of high-BPM songs, with a Guitar Hero style of punches on a track acting as the equivalent for notes. There’s a nice dose of haptic feedback on the JoyCon controllers each time you land a punch, with bonus points up for grabs if you time your throw perfectly with the beat. These all contribute to an overall points score at the end of each routine, which is a nice measurable way of tracking your progress and beating your score.

As someone who goes to the gym quite regularly, though, it’s unlikely that Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer will ever become my primary form of exercise. It’s not the kind of thing that those already active will necessarily gravitate towards to alter their routine, but it’s also not trying to be that at all. Instead, it’s designed as a jumping-in point for newcomers and those looking to get more active, and it absolutely works in that regard.

Overall, your mileage with Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer will vary depending on the extent of your activity and your willingness to buy into the game’s routine. Fortunately, the exercise gameplay loop is fun and gamified enough to engage you instantly and want to improve. For an exercise game, that’s all you can really ask.