For an indie game with a small initial price tag, Punch Club took me on a fairly dramatic ride. I put in a total of 16 hours to complete the game and if you asked me for my opinion about the game in the first hour or two, my thoughts would have been completely different than what they were at hours 5, 10, and 12. I can’t say I’ve ever really had such drastic opinion changes about a game this size before.
Punch Club is a game that’s part strategy, part RPG, part simulator done in a super clean pixel art style. It’s story-based with branching paths, so people who play through the game once can have a pretty different story experience going through it again. And since it’s sort of a fighter, you can specialize in different martial arts styles as well.
You train in your own garage or in gyms to increase your strength, agility, and stamina. At the end of every day, you lose progress in all three stats, so if you don’t keep up your daily exercise regimen, you can have a net loss of your powers overall.
Getting into fights, whether they be friendly sparring rounds, or unregulated street fights, or commercial matches, gains you a small amount of experience that can be spend on new combat moves or permanent passive perks to your character.
But you also need to maintain your health, happiness, hunger, and how tired you are.
It’s a parody largely on fighting and martial arts movies and video games, but there are plenty of pop culture nudges tossed into the mix here and there. There are clear references to Rocky, Bloodsport, Chuck Norris, Mortal Kombat, Bruce Lee, the Street Fighter series, Steven Seagal, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fight Club, Pulp Fiction, The Simpsons, The A-Team, Jay and Silent Bob, just to name a few.
It’s a pretty clever game in its concept and its execution. The pixel art is absolutely gorgeous. The music held its own as long as it could. The chiptune loops are on the short side, so even though the music wasn’t bad, I had my fill of it before I finished the game. That’s coming from a guy who listens to chiptunes for enjoyment pretty regularly.
My first impressions with Punch Club? I was bored. Bored bored bored. I almost stopped playing entirely. The game is a point and click interface. User input is important, but skill? Skill is 100% unnecessary to play this game. And that’s why I’d call it a “casual” experience. And that alone felt like an odd dichotomy to me. A casual fighting game.
When you get into fights, you have no real control over what happens on screen. It is essentially a digital cock fight. You can select which skills your character has available during each round, but all the kicking, dodging and blocking is completely controlled by the PC. So the guy with the higher stats and more advanced “moves” (and I’d like to note that I’m saying “moves facetiously) is almost always going to win. If I stopped my game after the first hour and decided to write a “review,” I would have given it a “don’t bother” rating.
But after some time, I started to truly appreciate the game in the early phases. There was a real need to balance your character’s life between work, resting, fighting, training, and trying to make friends, and discover how the game branches out. I immediately dismissed my earlier concerns for the lack of input during fights, and for the pretty brutal negative impact the game put on character’s daily stats. I was enjoying myself and couldn’t wait to play more.
The little pop culture references started to have more and more of a relevant effect on the game world, and that too became fascinating. I got hooked and really started to love the game. If I stopped the game right there and made my review, I would have given the game a “worth buying” rating.
As the game progressed, I quickly became jaded. Initially I was excited by unlocking my skill tree’s special moves and I was hoping to not only see a drastic change in my character’s performance, but in his animated moves as well. Turns out I was mistaken. A standard kick, flip kick, viper kick, and roundhouse kick they all look exactly the same. The only way to tell if your character is performing any particular special move is by watching the highlighted move icons in the corner of the screen. I found this to be incredibly lame considering the amount of detail that went into creating such lively environments and initial move animations. It’s bizarre that developer Lazy Bear Games thought that two punch animations and two kick animations would be enough for a game about martial arts.
But aside from being disappointed about the game’s lack of animations, I was also saddened about how quickly the game tapers off from its original open feel and turns into an absolute grindfest.
And not the fun kind of grind, either. The terrible kind of grind that make me wonder why I was still playing. The end of day hit to my stats were so brutal by the end of my game, that my character wasn’t sleeping anymore. He was just living at the gym and working out 24 hours a day. When he’d get hungry or tired, he’d stop at the vending machine and fill up on energy drinks and protein bars. So he wasn’t sleeping for weeks and filling up on junk food daily, just so he could maybe, just maybe, see a temporary increase in stats long enough where he could challenge his next contender. If he lost the round, he’d have to go back to the gym and slam more junk food and just cycle through the equipment just to maintain his current build.
And I hated that.
Punch Club does so much right in so many little areas, but does a few things wrong in very crucial areas. It needs some gameplay balancing to get rid of that absurd grind in the last act. Hopefully it’s not too late to patch in some new move animations, because if players can’t input commands to help alter the outcome of each fight, the least thing that can be done is make the fights semi-entertaining to watch. Gorgeous sprites, some small, but interesting story ideas, and pop culture references can’t save the game from everything.
Tested on: PC
Developer: Lazy Bear Games
Publisher: tinyBuild
Platforms: Windows
Relaunch Date: January 8, 2016
Review copy provided by publisher