Punch Club is a fighting management sim by Tiny Build games. And, as anyone can see, it’s positively dripping nostalgia.
Story-wise, it doesn’t take itself super seriously. Think something like Kung Fury in video game form. We’re talking ninjas, Russian super fighters, wrestlemen. I think I recall fighting a bear at one point. Ultimately, it’s about your character becoming the very best that no one ever was.
The game is filled to the brim with references to fighting-related franchises. You can find nods to Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat all over the place, as well as Double Dragon and other such titles. You’ll find more than a few references to the Rocky movies. You even fight 3/4 of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Crocodiles. It’s a crazy game, man.
Most of the early game has you desperately trying to balance workouts for your next fight with earning enough money to keep your training up. This is made tougher by random muggers showing up to beat you up and take half your money any time you’re carrying more than $140 around with you. You can fight them, but in the early game it’s easier to avoid dealing with them by simply not carrying enough to make them appear. Moreover, the crazy level of stat decay pretty much demands that you spend at least some of a day working out rather than just working. You can buy a few perks that keep a given stat from dropping beneath a certain level, but anything worth having above that level will require maintenance.
Speaking of stats, as of this writing, Agility is the most important. You really can’t expect to keep all of your stats high, so you can only realistically focus on two of the three, and chances are you’ll be smart enough to pick Agility and Stamina, since they don’t really have a downside, unlike Strength, which ups your energy usage in fights. While any build would realistically need to use a dump stat, builds without Agility are currently untenable; Strength needs Agility to be able to hit anything, and most of Stamina’s skills are, from my understanding, fairly lame in a fight.
You need to manage a very short in game day wisely. This is only compounded by the aforementioned stat decay and muggers. Moreover, your combat performance can be impacted by not keeping your health up, as it’s directly tied to your maximum HP in fights as determined by your Stamina. Both health and happiness (needed to get full points from working out) can be raised by working out/eating/doing certain jobs. But working out uses food and energy, and since food costs money and working for money costs energy and happiness. Long story short, you’re going to fall into a particular routine until you either beat up all the muggers or become too strong for them to risk attacking you.
Late game, by comparison, is much easier. Once you up your daily allowance to a certain level, you don’t need to worry about money in the short term anymore. Your only focus is getting enough fame to fight your next opponent through Movie/Gang War endurance fights (depending on if you’re rolling Champion or Criminal path), throwing parties or whatever and shooting commercials for money to throw said parties. The closer to the end you get, the more insane you can get, living in a way that you couldn’t imagine before. By the end, my fighter was a training and pirate fighting machine that never slept thanks to all the energy drinks, coffee, and meats. He existed solely to literally kick the shit out of anything that crossed his path, and presumably have the most painful bowel movements this side of India.
Graphics follow the usual indie route. The pixel graphics in the game are well made overall. They’re very evocative of 90’s era games like Streets of Rage, though often more colorful. That being said, a few more fight animations wouldn’t hurt. The soundtrack is fairly decent, though there is a problem; there really needs to be more tracks. you will hear the same two tracks throughout the entire game, with different tracks only showing up for cutscenes.
In closing, Punch Club is a fun game with a few little problems. Since the developer is dedicated to ironing things out, I’m sure there will be even fewer things on the downside for the game. I did, after all, have fun with the game.
|
Pros: + Tons of references to fighting games and movies + Defeating opponents is incredibly satisfying + Pixel graphics are nice, even when they aren’t fluid + Developer committed to improving the game |
Cons: – Atrocious menus – Stats aren’t balanced – Stat decay is insane – UI is sometimes too simple for its own good – Early game will kick your ass; late game is very grindy |
Title: Punch Club
Developer: Lazy Bear Games
Publisher: tinyBuild
Platform: PC
Price: $9.99 (13.99 Deluxe edition)
*We were provided a copy of this game for review*
About Author
