When I went to EGX recently (September was recent, right?), Punch Club was one of the titles that caught my eye in the indie section. It had an aesthetic that felt nostalgic yet revitalised, alongside seemingly fresh gameplay. Sadly, my time was spent trying to work out the onomatopoeia for my palm colliding with my face as I spent half the time staring into space.
Funny how conventions can be unintentionally deceiving.
Punch Club is a… “game” by Lazy Bear Games. To categorise it as a particular genre would do disservice to how much of a bizarre creature this is. If you pressed me for a genre, I guess you could boil it down to a bizarre RPG/life-sim/management/strategy game, but even that’s simplifying it. You’re going to have to bear with me as I try to unravel what it is.
The core gameplay–the meat of the matter–is the one-on-one fights you have. For ten seconds your character and the enemy will trade blows. What are these blows? Well, they are the skills you set up your character to have, and you can swap them in and out between rounds. After some fights you will gain skill points which can be used to unlock skills (or passive traits) in one of four skill trees: The starting tree and three additional trees you can venture down.
These different trails are specific to the three ability scores you have: Strength, Agility, and Stamina. Strength increases the damage you do with attacks, Agility improves accuracy and dodge chance, while Stamina improves stamina recovery and damage absorption. In addition, they have their own favoured skills which in turn have requirements to unlock, which sometimes include ability score amounts.
Although, levelling up abilities isn’t as simple as slapping enemies around until your fists bleed. You will need to use training equipment that will eventually level up the ability score, however doing so uses up time in the day. Yet, like Sisyphus, as you push the rock up the hill it rolls back down; at the end of every day, some of each ability score is drained away down the gutter. So you must manage your time carefully, on top of feeding your protagonist, allowing him to sleep, keeping him healthy, and making sure he is cheery enough to exercise.
All of this amounts to gameplay that, rather than keeps you on your toes, actually makes for a relaxing time. You’ll spend hour after hour grinding away on fitness equipment–in a similar manner to grinding for levels in a JRPG–and yet it doesn’t feel tedious. This is especially odd as the in-fight gameplay involves picking skills at the beginning of the round and watching it play out on its own. Instead it just feels like a peaceful time killer to play around with as long as you have the patience for it, in a similar way to playing a game on your phone.
Although that isn’t to say it is a narrow path to victory. As I’ve said before, there are three different distinct paths, yet there’s room if you wish to garnish said paths. Will you be the power-strong brute who sacrifices lasting power and agility for raw strength? Will you decide to sprinkle your brutality with stamina so you can last? Or will you even perhaps go for an even build in the form of jack-of-all-trades (not recommended, but plausible)? Even then, each build offers different skills that are entirely up to you on how to play.
Despite this feast of builds, there is one thing the developer seems to have forgotten to do with it: If you accidentally spend your points making a build that doesn’t work, you’re stuck with it. There is no reset function at all; You’re stuck with the foolish mistakes you make.
Sadly, missing the last small part that clicks the game together is an ongoing theme. Another example is how I had reached a part of the game (moving into a mansion) where I thought gaining skill points wasn’t possible (which is where you’ll improve your fighter the most) since the fighting circuits had closed. However, the game had forgotten to mention that one particular activity also helped you gain skill points. I had to find that out via the Steam forums as I was stuck on a fight.
Perhaps even more aggravating is how seemingly luck-based combat works out. As combat is resolved by each fighter randomly using the skills they have on hand until they run out of stamina (which they will often do, at least based on my experience), sometimes you’ll lose fights that were clearly in your favour. This can lead to banging your head against the wall until the cracks in said wall give.
Despite this, I admit my temper is often cooled by the charisma Punch Club seeps. The aesthetic actually looks good beyond being a nostalgic hat-tip for the audience. There are also a scattering of pop-culture references that, fortunately, aren’t so on-the-nose about it as to cause nosebleeds. Oddly, they make the game world more interesting in an uncanny valley alternative-dimension sort of way. Even though the game is long (15 hours, and I don’t feel like I’ve seen the end of it), I haven’t felt bored at all by how it progressed.
The final score for Punch Club is a 7/10. Earlier in the review I made a comparison to the type of mobile phone game you mess about with for 10 minutes at a time during a lull in your day; That is what Punch Club is at its core. The only thing that makes it tricky for such a playthrough (besides it being more of a tablet game considering the interface) is how lengthy it is, even if you exclude the grinding you will be doing. So if you’re looking for a game to relax and mindlessly play with without dedicating too much attention, Punch Club is the club you’ve been in want for.
A PC code for Punch Club was provided by Lazy Bear Games for the purpose of this review