It seems odd to think how quickly the “retro” aesthetic for games has not only become accepted but almost obligatory on certain platforms. Plenty of games lately, primarily for mobile platforms, have embraced the 8-bit art style from its early Super Mario roots to its zenith. Of course, there’s all that history that hadn’t existed when Mario was making his first runs through the Mushroom Kingdom, all those ideas that hadn’t yet been tried out. Which brings us to Punch Club, a delightfully retro-styled game that goes off in slightly different directions than its forebears.
One could be forgiven for seeing Punch Club as the heir to classic beat-em-up adventures such as Double Dragon or Streets of Rage on first screenshot blush. But the amount of beating up, which can be substantial, isn’t something you directly control. Instead, you work your way through the ranks of boxing leagues by training and selecting various combat moves which trigger automatically in a random fashion. All the while, you make your way through the daily grind of making sure you have money to pay bills, food in the fridge, and finding the mysterious stranger who shot your dad right in front of you. And it is a grind, but it’s all for a good purpose. Along the way, you’ll meet all manner of characters, potentially learn three different forms of martial arts, and find yourself getting snot kicked out of you more often than you would care to admit from street punks to mutant alligators in the sewers. If anything, this game owes more to RPGs and classic adventures such as Monkey Island and Full Throttle than anything else.
The graphics are, understandably, done in a style that calls to mind older video games, though they feel more like the 16-bit titles from the early Genesis days than anything else. If one was looking for a description of the setting, the best one could come up with would be “early 90s.” There are certainly some references to the 80s scattered throughout the game, but there are a lot more 90s references such as Jay and Silent Bob hanging out in front of the local convenience store, and Jules and Vincent (from Pulp Fiction) taking up a booth in a pizza parlor. It’s something that generally helps get you in the right frame of mind, harkening back to those days when you put a compact black cart into the slot and heard the Sega fanfare before seeing the title screen. Character animations are appropriately blocky and fun to watch. The game goes hard for the classic video game feel and nails it.
Keeping with the established visual vibe, the soundtrack puts on a good selection of chip tunes, though some tracks are obviously going to get more play than others, particularly the fighting sequences. As one would expect, you’re not going to be hearing detailed voice acting for the characters in this game. Nope, just the best synthesized sweding for this title, which is perfect. You may get tired of those tracks, and you might shake your head at the unintelligible burbles passing for speech, but this is very smart sound design for an indie game and it’s an attention to detail that any game could take a lesson from.
The gameplay is maybe the most difficult element to judge. You have a lot of control over where your character can go, what they can do, what attributes to train up, what jobs to take, all of it unfolding quite naturally. However, the actual fighting component of the game is an element where your control is almost non-existent. When going through fights, whether for advancement in the local league or facing off against the fat street gang leader, you are basically limited to choosing your moves between rounds (yes, even the street gang fights have a round structure) and hoping that you’ve got a set of moves that lets you survive. More often than not, you are going to be disappointed. Since you have no direct control over the fights, you can’t choose when to defend and when to attack, when to probe and when to fire off a combo. It almost makes a mockery of the title, seemingly stuck in a thankless grind on the chance that the game’s random number generator decides to come up with results in your favor more often than not. At the same time, though, you kind of get the feeling that the game is as much spoof as it is homage, that it uses the sometimes ridiculous plot elements of early beat-em-ups as much to crack jokes as it does to present players with a coherent story. After all, when your first DLC makes an overly dramatic cutscene involving you losing your grip on a cat’s paw and letting him fall to one of his nine deaths, it’s a little hard to take things completely seriously on the gameplay front.
For those who are in the mood for a good retro-styled game without any of that pesky button-mashing fighting nonsense, Punch Club might just ring your bell.
Punch Club was reviewed on PC and an Android tablet using download codes provided by the publisher.
Punch Club
Pros
- - Plenty of good retro style
- - Subverts genre expectations
Cons
- - Lack of control in fighting can be frustrating
- - Terribly grindy