Drunken Boxing 2

Drunken Boxing 2 downloads 27.7 megabytes before it will show you a title screen. The game it is a sequel to needs 567 kilobytes to start and streams the rest while you are already fighting. That gap — roughly forty-nine to one — is the single most useful thing to know about this game, and no page that lists it will tell you.

What you get for the wait is a genuine rebuild rather than a reskin. The first Drunken Boxing was a Construct 3 project running Box2D, a two-dimensional physics library. The sequel is a Unity 2020.3 WebGL build with 3D physics, an active-ragdoll rig on the boxers, a camera that tracks the fight and zooms when the two of them close, and the full Unity post-processing stack layered on top: bloom, vignette, depth of field, chromatic aberration, ambient occlusion, motion blur. The ring is split down the middle in orange and blue, spotlights cut through the haze, and a jumbotron above the canvas heckles the loser between rounds with FASTER and TOUGHER and STRONGER.

What you do not get is a new game. The rules are the ones you already know: two boxers, one energy bar each, a punch on the left arrow and a punch on the right, and the bar empties as you swing. Fourteen punches in a row drained mine to almost nothing, and a boxer with an empty bar is a boxer taking free shots to the head. First to five knockdowns wins. Five outlined stars sit under each energy bar and light up one at a time, with the round counter between them.

It was released in July 2021 by RHM Interactive OÜ, the Tallinn-registered company that has run twoplayergames.org since 2008 — a credit the Unity build confirms in its own configuration, which names RHM Interactive as the company — and the build currently served was compiled in December 2022. On the studio's own portal it holds 4.3 out of 5 from 2,819 votes — the same score as the original, from a fifth of the votes. Five years after the sequel arrived, the 2016 game is still the one people keep rating, with 13,113. That is worth sitting with before you pick one.

What Drunken Boxing 2 actually changed

Set the two games side by side and the honest list of differences is short. Modes: identical, 1P and 2P. Win condition: identical, first to five. Energy bar: identical. Keyboard layout: identical, arrows against WASD. Nothing was added to the rules.

The change is underneath. The original's boxers were 2D sprites driven by Box2D, the same library that powers most browser physics games. The sequel's boxers are 3D meshes on a joint rig — the build contains Unity's ConfigurableJoint, capsule and box colliders, and code that switches limbs in and out of ragdoll on impact. That is why the sequel's staggering reads as a body losing balance while the original's reads as a puppet on a hinge. It is a better-looking wobble and, in fairness to the studio, a genuinely different simulation. It is not a different sport.

If you want the game that started it, Drunken Boxing is still here, and its page covers where the name comes from — zui quan, the Chinese drunken-fist style that real martial artists train and that Jackie Chan put on cinema screens.

The 27 MB question

Here is what a browser has to fetch before Drunken Boxing 2 draws its first frame, measured with gzip negotiated the way a real browser negotiates it:

File	Size
GM_DrunkenBoxing2.loader.js	14 KB
GM_DrunkenBoxing2.framework.js.unityweb	92 KB
GM_DrunkenBoxing2.wasm.unityweb	6.53 MB
GM_DrunkenBoxing2.data.unityweb	21.06 MB
Total, all of it blocking	27.7 MB

Once downloaded, those two big files decompress to about 27.5 MB of asset data and 22 MB of WebAssembly — roughly 49 MB of memory before a single boxer is drawn.

The first Drunken Boxing loads its engine, its Box2D physics and its whole project definition in 567 KB, then pulls its 140 images and 78 sound files as it needs them. Even counting every last asset, the original totals 8.9 MB spread over 238 files that arrive while you play. The sequel is three times the whole original, and forty-nine times the part you have to wait for.

Some of that weight is the 3D art and the post-processing, which is what you came for. Some of it is not. The build ships 125 compiled feedback classes from the Feel toolkit, its demo assemblies, a mobile haptics library that a browser cannot use, and an in-app-purchase listener in a free web game. None of that runs. All of it downloads.

Drunken Boxing 2 unblocked at school

The game is a plain web page with nothing to install, no plugin and no account, so a school filter is not usually what stops it — if the site loads, the game loads. The real obstacle is different, and worth saying plainly: 27.7 MB over a shared classroom connection takes a while, and a Chromebook with 4 GB of RAM and an integrated GPU has to hold about 49 MB of WebGL data plus whatever else the browser has open. On tired hardware the tab can crawl, drop frames during the post-processing, or reload itself mid-match.

If that is your machine, the original is not a consolation prize — it is the better version for you. It starts in a second, runs at full speed on anything, and plays exactly the same. Use the sequel when you are on a laptop that can carry it, and use the fullscreen button so the 3D ring gets the pixels it was built for.

More games by RHM Interactive

The Drunken shelf is large and most of it is lighter than this one. Drunken Duel 2 is a one-button gunfight — built by HiHoy Games and published under the series name — while Drunken Slap Wars is a slapping contest with the same wobble and Drunken Spin Punch puts the two fighters on a rotating platform. RHM's other big two-player hit is Boxing Random, where the controls and the physics are rerolled every round. For a whole tournament of quick duels, 12 MiniBattles does twelve of them in one game. More two-player brawls are in our action category.

1. Choose your mode. The title screen offers 1P against the CPU and 2P for two people on one keyboard. Give the loader time; it is moving 27 MB.
2. Learn four keys. Player 1: left and right arrows throw the left and right punch, up walks forward, down drops the stance. Player 2 mirrors it on A, D, W and S.
3. Watch the bar, not the boxer. The orange bar top-left is you, the blue bar top-right is your opponent. Every punch costs a slice of it and there is no other health meter in the game.
4. Put them down. A clean hit sends the other boxer sprawling, the impact throws a burst of sparks, a star lights up on your side and the round counter advances.
5. Reach five stars. The match ends on a WINNER screen with a home button and a rematch button.

Tips from playing it:

• The bar is the whole game. Punches are free to throw and expensive to land. Two punches, back off with down, let the bar climb, go again. Players who mash left-right-left-right lose to players who wait, every time.
• Let the camera tell you the range. The 3D camera zooms in as the boxers close and pulls back when they separate. When the view tightens, you are in punching distance — and so is the CPU.
• The CPU has the same tell as in the first game. It swings the moment it is in range, so it runs its own bar down without help. Give ground, count its punches, step in when it stops throwing.
• Corners are worse here than in the original. The ring is modelled in 3D and the boxers have real depth, so a fighter backed onto the ropes has less room to stagger away from a swing. Fight nearer the middle.
• A knockdown is a physics event, not an animation. There is no fixed knockdown clip, so a hit that catches the head sends the ragdoll further than one that catches the body. Aim high when the opponent is upright.