Meta Store ratings and the multiplayer problem
This game has improved enormously and is now excellent in the single-player mode—much better than TOTF1, in my opinion. I am a demanding player who once gave this game a 1-star rating, and I eventually changed it to 5 stars.
It is also possible to have very good two-player training sessions with a friend who has common sense and knows how to box reasonably well, using direct fights through the code.
However, there is a major problem.
On the Meta Store, many of the positive reviews—and probably the majority of them—are about the single-player experience. At the same time, there are still a large number of furious posts from players complaining about children who abuse hook spam, one-punch knockouts, and other exploits in ranked multiplayer. This is still happening on a large scale.
The game will never improve its overall rating, which in my opinion should be at least around 4.3, as long as players who only play multiplayer continue to trash the game and describe it as the worst boxing game of all time.
Something needs to be done about this. One possible solution would be to significantly reduce the ability to abuse hook spam and other exploits, while making multiplayer more focused on mid- to long-range boxing, as it was in V3. That would favor a style based more on jabs, distance control, and straight punches.
This is by far the style that works best in VR boxing because it emphasizes reflexes, distance control, speed, and feints.
A huge part of the frustration people have with this game is related to close-range fighting and poor punch tracking.
Some people are passionate about mexican-style boxing, fighting at close range, but not everything can be properly simulated in VR yet. We simply cannot simulate things like pushing with the shoulder and chest, or head pushes like Golovkin used to do, with only a head sensor and hand tracking.
Close-range fighting between two players is extremely difficult to simulate properly in VR because there are no real physical collisions between the players' bodies. One player's body can pass through the other, and new exploits can constantly be created by taking advantage of these gaps in the simulation.
I think the multiplayer needs to be designed around what VR can simulate well, rather than constantly trying to reproduce close-range boxing situations that the technology still struggles to handle.
The single-player game has reached a very high level. It would be a shame if the multiplayer problems continued to damage the game's reputation and its overall rating on the Meta Store.