The ‘Championship Edition’ of Creed: Rise to Glory is available now for PSVR 2 and Quest 2.
Survios revealed the April 4 release date just before the release of PSVR 2 and we’ve embedded a new launch day trailer above. The Championship Edition includes “new characters and a new location from” the new Creed III film which continues with Adonis Creed taking over the Rocky franchise.
The new edition is a free upgrade for Quest 2 owners while it’s a $19.99 upgrade for original PSVR owners wanting the PS5 edition for PSVR 2. The standard release of Creed: Rise to Glory – Championship Edition is available for $39.99 on PSVR 2 for PS5. A ‘Deluxe’ release of Championship Edition is also available for $49.99, which includes an additional 22 “glow” costumes and is available as an upgrade from the PS4 Creed release for $29.99.
According to the PlayStation blog, the ‘Championship Edition’ on PSVR 2 makes use of eye-tracked foveated rendering along with support for HDR and overall “enhanced fidelity” compared to the original release. The blog post also mentions improved haptics, implemented in both the headset and Sense controllers, alongside 3D audio support, “lightning-fast” load times and support for cross-platform online play.
This article was originally published March 19, 2023 with the Championship Edition’s release date announcement, and updated with new details with release on April 4, 2023.
Survios announced that Creed: Rise to Glory surpassed 1 million units sold across all VR platforms this week.
Creed: Rise to Glory released in 2018 for PC VR platforms and was later a launch title for the original Oculus Quest headset in May 2019.
The game joins a number of VR applications that have seen increasing success in the last few years, likely due to the popularity of Facebook’s standalone Quest headsets. In July this year, Gorn reached the 1 million units sold milestone. Likewise, Job Simulator also reach 1 million units, but considerably earlier, back in January 2020. PSVR-exclusive Resident Evil 7 surpassed 1 million VR users in January of this year as well.
The developers of Gorn, Job Simulator and Creed did not give breakdowns of which platforms contributed the most to reaching the 1 million milestone, but there’s a pattern of games that were previously released on PC VR or PSVR seeing great success and a boost in sales on the Quest platform, even years down the line, thanks the standalone headset’s ever-growing popularity. In Gorn’s case, no doubt the Quest launch in January 2020 helped it reached the big 1 million milestone a few months later in July.
Games like Apex Construct or Red Matter, meanwhile, sold more on Quest than all other platforms combined within months of the original headset’s launch.
Survios’ latest title is Puzzle Bobble VR, which released for Quest back in May. It’s not clear what the studio is working on next in the VR space.
Creed: Rise to Glory received a new update this week that adds an all-new fitness-focused ‘Endurance Mode’ on Quest that lets you go another round in the ring, providing better exercise options within the game.
The developers said that they designed the mode to be used alongside Oculus Move, Facebook’s built-in fitness tracker on the Quest, so you can see how many calories you’re burning and track your progress. The biggest change with endurance mode is that the game’s virtual stamina system has been removed entirely, so your character won’t get tired or worn out until you do.
Pull no punches in our new #CreedRTG ENDURANCE UPDATE for Oculus Quest.
Endurance Mode: No virtual stamina! Fight Settings: Tailor your play Enhanced visuals for Quest 2
This should let you keep throwing out punches for as long as you want while exercising in Creed without having to worry about the game’s systems restricting you or slowing you down. On the Survios blog, the developers claimed that research done by a company called Virtually Healthy found that players in endurance mode exerted a higher max heart rate on average than those playing in normal mode.
You can also tailor these matches to your needs with opponent difficulty scales. If you’re using a Quest 2, you might also notice some visual enhancements such as improved textures, shadows and render resolution, which were added in this update as well.
The update is entirely free for existing owners of the game on Quest. If you don’t own the game yet, it’s on sale to celebrate the new features at a 33% discount, bringing it down to just $19.99.
The Survios blog post doesn’t mention any other platforms, so for now it looks like the update may only be available for the Quest platform.
Ian Fitz, the independent VR developer behind popular VR boxing simulator, Thrill of the Fight, stated in an email to a Reddit user that even though his game designed to theoretically work well without controllers, it would not be getting support for Quest hand-tracking due to the device’s current limitations.
Thrill of the Fight is a very active and very intense VR game that pits players against AI-controlled opponents in boxing rings. As opposed to games like Creed: Rise to Glory or Knockout League, which are a bit more arcade-style, Thrill of the Fight is more focused on simulation-style gameplay. To that end, it feels more like you’re actually boxing than most others.
Since accuracy is extremely important in a game like this, Quest’s hand tracking wasn’t quite good enough (at this stage) to work for his game, according to Fitz. The full email states:
“TotF [Thrill of the Fight] was intentionally designed to be usable without button presses and so would theoretically work great with hand tracking. I’ve played around with the hand tracking on Quest though, and it doesn’t seem capable enough to handle the gameplay of TotF. The hand tracking only works when it has a good view of your hands in a specific area in front of the headset. It loses track of the hands if they are too close to the headset, too far away, or too far to the sides, so it doesn’t handle blocking or punching well.”
Based on that logic, it makes sense why the most practical use cases for hand-tracking on Quest right now revolve around menu and UI navigation and very light interactions rather than actively punching and moving around a lot. Maybe in a future iteration of the Quest when cameras have a wider tracking volume and can keep up with fast hand speeds things will be different.
We’ve reached out to Fitz as well directly for additional comment on the topic and will update this post if we hear back.
Which games do you most want to play with hand-tracking on Quest? Let us know down in the comments below!
CREED: Rise to Glory (2018), the VR boxing game from Survios that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, just got a new update on all supported platforms that brings a number of classic Rocky characters to the game.
Dubbed the ‘Rocky Legends Update’, the game’s latest free update brings a few iconic figures from the namesake’s cinematic universe including Rocky Balboa, Apollo Creed, Rocky III’s ‘Southside Slugger’ Clubber Lang (aka Mr. T), and Ivan Drago from Rocky IV.
Like Creed: Rise to Glory’spenultimate update, which brought Viktor Drago and Adonis Creed’s old Delphi Gym rival Danny Wheeler to the game, the new characters can be experienced both as Freeplay opponents and as a selectable PvP characters.
PSVR players are getting one additional goodie for this update—the outdoor Walcott Bowl fighting ring.
CREED: Rise to Glory (2018), the VR boxing game from Survios, is about to launch its first free content update soon, which is bringing two new characters to all supported platforms.
Coming November 27th, the free content update is bringing competitors Viktor Drago, son of Ivan “The Siberian Express” Drago, and Adonis Creed’s old Delphi Gym rival Danny Wheeler, portrayed in the films by real life professional boxer Andre Ward.
Image courtesy Survios
The content update is set to release a few days after CREED II debuts in theaters (November 21st), a story that again follows Adonis Creed on his quest to become the light heavyweight champ, this time facing off against Viktor Drago.
If you’ve seen Rocky IV (1985), you’ll probably familiar with Viktor’s father Ivan Drago (“I must break you.”), the Soviet boxer who killed Adonis’ father Apollo Creed during an exhibition bout.
Both new characters will be available in both PvP mode and freeplay mode, which lets you choose and go up against any fighter on the roster.
CREED: Rise to Glory supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PSVR, is available on Steam (Vive, Rift), the Oculus Store (Rift), and the PlayStation Store (PSVR), priced at $25.
While you wait, check out our in-depth review to find out why we gave a solid [7.7/10].
From Knockout League to Thrill of the Fight and a litany of exercise-focused apps, there are plenty of ways to get your VR boxing fix right now. If you like slamming your fists into punching bags and beating virtual enemies into a pulp, then you have plenty of avenues to pursue that. But there isn’t a reliable way to strap on boxing gloves and go toe-to-toe with another real person in VR — at least, not until Creed: Rise to Glory from Survios.
Once upon a time there were a couple of Rocky boxing games on the PS2 and Xbox (Rocky and Rocky Legends) both of which were lackluster at best. Before those we of course had Punch-Out!! on the NES and SNES, which Knockout League replicates well, similar in ways to the Ready 2 Rumble series. When I first played Creed VR back at GDC 2018 the first comparison that came to mind was Fight Night with the mixture of realistic graphics and sim-lite gameplay. What I actually found isn’t that deep, but still left me satisfied.
In Creed: Rise to Glory you take control of the titular character, Adonis Creed, in a hodge-podge experience that’s part prequel to the first movie and part bridge to the sequel that releases later this year in theaters. The Campaign mode is really more like a bare bones Arcade-style experience that has you fighting a gallery of foes back-to-back that get increasingly more difficult as time goes on. You’ll even notice a few boxers that were featured in the original film.
Freeplay is a bit like Campaign, but you can just hop into whatever ring against whichever opponent you want. There were a lot more rings to pick from than I expected, but honestly you only look around at the environment before the match starts. Once that bell rings your eyes are locked on your opponent. Make no mistake though: the real highlight of Creed VR, interestingly enough, is the PvP multiplayer. That feature wasn’t even revealed until very recently but it was by far my favorite part of the game.
Fighting against AI is fine, but eventually it just boils down to pattern recognition and timing. The easier boxers won’t have as many combos and won’t block as much and even the hardest ones have certain tells to look out for. But when you play against real life human opponents, everything changes. People are unpredictable, they can try and bait you, or fake you out, or even taunt you over the mic. You can see a couple bouts of me fighting against Ian Hamilton up in the video above.
Regardless of game mode the mechanics are always the same. You’ll need two motion controllers for whichever platform you choose (I played on Rift using Touch) and plenty of space. Like, a lot of space. It’s tempting to just make sure you have enough room to stand up and stretch your arms out, but that’s not enough space. You need to be able to lean back, duck, bob from side-to-side, and take at least two steps in either direction if you want to really experience all that this game has to offer.
Creed VR does a great job of actually tracking your hand movement well and translating that into the game. Punch speed and strength does make a difference, as does where on the body your hits land. Grazing the side of their head or just slamming into their blocking fists isn’t going to do anything — you need to make solid contact with their face or body to do damage. That means a mixture of body movement, straights, uppercuts, hooks, and everything else. The more you treat Creed VR like a boxing simulation, the more success you’ll have.
Since the body animations and IK for your avatar’s simulated body all work well, it really does feel like your bobbing and weaving around inside the ring. Notably, I can’t recall many moments in which I wasn’t able to accurately do what I wanted because of tracking or control limitations. However, the one exception to that is it seems like during PvP most people are vulnerable over the top of their block on the crown of their head. If you just do a hammer fist maneuver or seven sweep your hand quickly over their block it will register as a hit even if you’re not really punching. Of all sports, boxing feels like the perfect match for VR and adding multiplayer just makes it even better.
Survios also developed what they’ve dubbed a “Phantom Melee” system to help simulate stamina loss, becoming staggered, or getting knocked down. Obviously those are all real things in boxing that need to be addressed, but if you’re playing a VR game, the developer can’t reasonably restrict your character or remove you from control. So instead, “Phantom Melee” is a bit like a mime system.
For example, if you get winded and over-exert your arms, they’ll turn red and you’ll have to bring them up to your face to regain stamina by resting. This also helps prevent people from just flailing around wildly because their character will get winded too fast, not be able to block well, and get dropped very quickly. Then if you get nailed really hard and become staggered (basically meaning stunned) then the game will show silhouetted versions of your fists in the air that you have to match the pose of to regain control. In this way, it forces you to pretend like your hands are flung upward as a result of a big punch.
Finally, if you get knocked down, Creed VR actually has you drumming your fists as fast as possible as if you are sprinting back to your body. It’s sort of like an out-of-body experience, like you got punched so hard your opponent sent your soul flying out of your body and you’ve gotta get back to it before the countdown is over.
All of these systems add up to matches never having much downtime, which is great, and it maintains the experience in multiplayer so that you can still do things like knock down your opponent or stagger them like you can against AI enemies without breaking immersion. I just wish the posing and miming bits weren’t quite as finicky, because sometimes it was a little frustrating not being able to regain control fast enough.
The final piece of the Creed VR puzzle are the training mini games. When you’re waiting on a PvP match to start or just wandering around the main lobby area, you have the entire floor of the gym open to explore. There are heavy bags you can use to practice flurry punches, dummies for combo training, moving directional bags for dodging, and more. All of the little mini games are fun and actually do a decent job of helping you hone actual tactics that you can apply inside the ring.
I don’t have any real boxing experience, but I used to go to a boxing gym for my workout and the trainers would have us do a lot of similar drills before we sparred and it’s really clever to see how those concepts are gamified and established inside VR. My biggest issue with them though is that the hit detection seems a bit off, especially on the combo dummies.
Final Score:8/10 – Great
Creed: Rise to Glory is the best all-around boxing game VR has seen yet. While its serviceable campaign mode lacks the depth and variety that we’ve come to expect from Survios releases and some of the controls are a bit finicky, it more than makes up for it with a litany of training mini games and an addictive PvP mode. Trading blows, ducking shots, and scoring a powerful knockout against someone in immersive VR is about as close to an actual boxing match as you can find from the comfort of your own home.
Creed: Rise to Glory is available starting today on Steam, Oculus Home, and PSVR for $29.99. And read our Content Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
CREED: Rise to Glory is a boxing game that aims to get you up and sweating with what promises to deliver the Rocky-style underdog victory that couch jockies like me have always dreamed about. While the campaign is both shorter and lighter on story than it probably could have been, it delivers some heavy-hitting game mechanics that do pretty well considering you’re effectively punching at air.
Developer: Survios Available On: Steam (Vive, Rift,), Oculus Store (Rift), PlayStation Store (PSVR) Reviewed On: Oculus Rift, HTC Vive Release Date: September 25th, 2018
Gameplay
There’s not much to know about the story behind Creed: Rise to Glory. Like in the films, you follow series protagonist Adonis “Hollywood” Creed, the son of Apollo Creed, and fight to become the champ.
Story elements are told through a radio program playing in the gym, which serves as your sanctuary where you can train before fights and hear a little bit about the boxing world outside of the gym’s four walls. A single flashback of you punching out a bouncer and presumably losing a love interest are light padding to the game’s main event: dodging and making sure your stamina isn’t too low so you can land effective punches during matches. And while I felt the story definitely could have played out to a grander, more dramatic effect with a longer arc than what its six primary enemies provided, the most important things are strong fundamentals and being engaging enough to revisit, which is clearly the case in Creed: Rise to Glory.
Image courtesy Survios
As someone who’s never boxed before, I can’t really say with much certainty how true Creed VR is to the actual sport, but it appears to have been game-ified well into arcade territory. The Rocky films, and by extension the Creed films, are fantastical fights that probably could never happen in reality anyway. Like with many sports films, the technicality of the sport is mostly lost in those big dramatized moments that challenge the main character, and help them come to a hard-won resolution. Stepping into the ring with the lights, the crowd, and the announcer, it easily matched up to my already warped expectations of how boxing is portrayed in film—that much I can say with confidence; I felt like I was in a movie, and it was awesome.
Iconic training montages with Rocky Balboa, voiced with a convincing-enough impression of Sylvester Stallone, prefaced most fights, giving you that all important cinematic touchstone.
Image captured by Road to VR
Introducing what Survios calls ‘Phantom Melee Technology’, Creed uses a sort of body desynchronization when either your stamina is low, or when you’re staggered from a powerful punch. Low stamina is indicated by the color of your gloves, which will flash red to make sure you know your punches will be slower than your actual physical ability to shadow box. This keeps you on the guard more than you might otherwise be, as the only way to recuperate stamina is by holding you hands still. Enemies will also dodge and block your hits too, making them more than just simple punching bags.
Getting staggered happens in two stages. A powerful punch can put you in a quick out-of-body experience that requires you to match up your hands to two targets, allowing you to pop back into the fight.
Image captured by Road to VR
More devastating punches can knock you way out of the ring, requiring you to ‘run’ back and jump back into your body. These are fun and truly creative ways of making you feel like you’re hanging on to a bare thread in the more difficult matches.
Image captured by Road to VR
A few methods of activating slow motion sequences really drive home the cinematic nature of the game, as you dodge a punch or land a big hit that places temporary target’s on your opponent’s body.
All of these systems work extremely well, but the learning curve is somewhat steep. There is no visible HP or stamina bar, so spending some extra time in training is probably a good thing so you can start to really feel out how many hits you can take and how many you can give before throwing yourself at the actual matches.
I beat the campaign mode in about an hour an a half on normal difficulty, although that was stretched out over several sessions simply based on my own admittedly out-of-shape cardio abilities. It’s easy to see using Creed: Rise to Glory in an actual cardio routine to get less than active people (like me) up from the chair and getting their heart pumping. I felt enemies weren’t terribly varied in the attack styles, as it seems difficulty is mostly based more on the NPC’s individual punch strength and HP.
While I was left somewhat disappointed by the shortness of the campaign mode, thankfully you can mix and match enemies, gyms, and boxing locales in free play. Another big addition recently announced to arrive on all platforms is PvP online multiplayer. Online multiplayer presents a good opportunity to really turn the technical difficulty up, as live players exploit tactics that NPCs simply can’t think of, like running around the ring and going for a drive-by punch. These online battles are intense, and provided some of my most tiring battles.
While at times on the cartoonish side, character models and their animations are very well-done and can be genuinely intimidating too. Seeing a near seven foot-tall guy trying to hit me in the face isn’t something I’m really used to, and even though nothing bad can happen outside of accidentally punching a wall/TV/monitor, there are some moments before the fight when you subconsciously size up the competition.
Image captured by Road to VR
Impressive and realistic set pieces help ground you in the world, although it’s clear Creed: Rise to Glory is definitely bucking up against some of the inherent limitations of the current state of VR. Without any bodily feedback outside of the controller’s haptics, it’s difficult to completely immerse yourself in the act of dodging and blocking, two things that require more than visual cues to accomplish. Oftentimes I had my gloves up, obscuring my vision, and without force feedback (which at this point isn’t possible), you just have to rely on the controller’s buzzy haptics and the game’s visual cues to tell if you’ve hit your opponent or pulled your punch too early. That said, it’s great to know that Creed VR has entirely bypassed the ‘waggle simulator’ trend of earlier titles, as it not only requires you to punch quickly, but do it accurately for the sake of lost stamina.
The game’s AI is pretty darn good. At moments I could feel the AI sussing out my head’s position and aiming accurately for my noggin despite I had dodged an earlier punch. NPCs feel mostly solid, although you can actually run through them if you want.
Image captured by Road to VR
While based mostly on room-scale movement, there are moments when you need to artificially move from point A to point B, including when you square off at the beginning of the fight and during moments when you’re knocked out and have to run back to your body to continue the fight. Moving in the game is accomplished by swinging your arms while holding down the applicable buttons on each controller, which sends you sliding forward. Artificial locomotion is generally useless during fights, so it usually comes down to standing in place and punching it out like rock’em sock’em robots, albeit with a little more finesse and dodging/blocking abilities.
Both room-scale and the game’s only other locomotion scheme, detailed above, are extremely comfortable ways of moving around VR.
That said, this is a very physical standing game that will get your heart beating, and definitely get you sweating through the padding on your headset if you’re not careful. That’s not so much a knock on the game’s comfort rating as it is an advisory to plan ahead. Pop on some gym shorts for an extended session, because you’ll soon be huffing and puffing with all the dodging, bobbing and punching you’ll be doing.
Like with many more physical VR games, there’s a risk of hyperextending your arms alla tennis elbow, so it may be best to take frequent breaks if you have some pre-existing joint issues.
Get your hand wraps and virtual boxing gloves ready because I just heard the bell ring and it’s time to get ready to fight! Creed: Rise To Glory releases tomorrow, September 25th, for PSVR, Rift, and Vive and we’ve got 10 Steam copies ready to hand out, for free, no strings attached. All you have to do is enter into our giveaway right here or down in the widget below.
Winners will be randomly selected. All of our keys are Steam keys, which means they will unlock the game with native support for either Rift or Vive.
For more on what we think of the game (our full review will be live at 7AM PT on September 25th) here is an excerpt from our most recent hands-on preview from a pre-E3 event over the summer:
The core of what makes Creed special among VR boxing titles is how it threads the needle between silly, arcade boxing like Knockout League and realism-focused simulation along the lines of Thrill of the Fight…Boxing as a sport is a great fit for VR because of how active it is and how focused it is on hand movement. Since motion controllers (and headsets) do a great job of tracking movement already, it’s a natural fit.
Winners will be selected at approximately 4PM PT on Tuesday, September 25th, 2018, the day the game launches. If you’d rather not click the link above, here is the embedded contest widget:
CREED: Rise to Glory, the upcoming arcade boxing game from VR studio Survios, is getting a PvP mode that will let you duke it out with other players in online matches. It was previously thought that the game would only feature single-player modes such as the game’s campaign, where you battle against NPC contenders on your quest to become light heavyweight champion of the world.
Revealed on the PlayStation blog, the online multiplayer mode will arrive at launch, at least on PSVR when the game arrives on September 25th. Creed will support PSVR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.
We’ve reached out to Survios to confirm that both Steam and Oculus Store versions will also have PvP, and will update this piece as soon as we learn more.
Creed: Rise to Glory puts you in the shoes of the Adonis Creed, the main protagonist played by Michael B. Jordan in both Creed (2015) and the upcoming sequel Creed II, which is slated to release on November 21st. We went hands-on with Creed: Rise to Glory at GDC earlier this year, and its core boxing mechanic seemed really promising.
Featuring a combat scheme Survios calls ‘Phantom Melee Technology’, Creed uses a sort of body desynchronization when either your stamina is low, or when you’re staggered from a powerful punch. This essentially makes it so you don’t throw punches willy-nilly and really narrows your focus so you fight tactically.
Creed: Rise to Glory is also said to arrive at “more than 500 VR arcades” starting on September 25th, although no comprehensive list of participating locations is available at this time.
Developing studio Survios is best known for their VR titles Raw Data (2017) and Sprint Vector (2018), and have recently released VR music tool Electronauts (2018).
Endurance Mode: No virtual stamina! 
