The life of a fighter is certainly not as easy as we think. As the biographies of the greatest fighters of our time teach us, or films like Rocky and Million Dollar Baby, the path of a fighter is fraught with difficulties and only thanks to hard training and strength of mind can it be overcome. Inspired by many of the boxing films that characterized the 80s and 90s, the independent Russian team Lazy Bear Games has given birth to Punch Club. This video game, available for PC and mobile devices, will allow us to experience our personal adventure in the world of mixed martial arts, in a game that is halfway between an RPG and a management software.
The beginning of a legend
It all begins in your childhood. Your father, one of the greatest fighters in the city, is brutally killed by a dark and mysterious man with a red eye, effectively leaving you orphans. Luckily for you Frank, your late father's policeman friend, decides to adopt you and, for years to come, sets you on the right path. But time passes and your thirst for revenge grows with it. On a day like any other you will meet Mick, an old retired mixed martial arts trainer, and this will change your life. You will find yourself challenging increasingly strong opponents in search of the truth about your past, in a video game that is strongly inspired by all those films and TV series that characterized the 80s and 90s.
Start with a sweep, continue with a hook and finish with an uppercut!
Punch Club is a somewhat atypical management software, but its strong point lies precisely in this. In fact, unlike other games of this genre, the plot certainly plays an important part. You will therefore not only have to worry about your workouts, but you will also have to entertain yourself in more or less random events that will allow you to choose which side of the law to be on. Will you follow the path of honesty set by Frank or will you give in to the idea of making easy money with not exactly legal actions? Thanks to this choice, the developers will allow you to reach the end of your adventure by following two diametrically opposed paths, providing you with twenty hours of gameplay. As we said at the beginning, this title is characterized by a strong RPG component. In fact, with the succession of training and your fights, you will acquire more and more skill points that will allow you to acquire some talents necessary to overcome the growing difficulties to which you will be subjected. The skill tree will start from a central trunk which will then branch out according to the fighting style you want to follow. You will therefore have access to the way of the bear if you focus everything on your physical strength, the way of the tiger if you rely on your agility and the way of the turtle if you decide that your strength will be your ability to withstand blows.
Choosing the fighting style that suits you best will soon be necessary. In fact, you will quickly learn that a good fighter must focus on only one strength. This is because your progress will inexorably decline every day. Of course, not only training hard will be enough to get ahead in the game, but it will also be necessary to dedicate some time to your life. In the course of our games we will soon be faced with a big obstacle, namely earning the vile money with which to support ourselves. Money, as in any advanced society, will play a fundamental role in this game. You will need it to pay for the gym membership for your individual lessons and last, but certainly not least, to buy food for your sustenance. However, being an exaggerated saver will not help you. In fact, by choosing to walk the streets instead of buying a bus ticket, sooner or later you will inevitably run into gangs of criminals who will want to rob you and, unless you are really strong, you will risk finding yourself with an empty wallet every time. In short, managing your life is not easy at all.
The gaming hub tries to be as simple as possible and consists of two separate bars. In the upper part, in addition to a small box that will allow you to keep an eye on your basic needs (health, hunger, fun and sleep), you will have the opportunity to see the level of your skills, your talent points and the remaining money in your wallet. In the vertical bar there are five small menus that will allow you to see your statistics, participate in fights, buy new talents, move around the city and double-check your progress in the story. Although Punch Club is developed by a Russian team, it has been localized into twelve different languages, including Spanish. Thanks to this translation you will be able to grasp many small nuances of the plot that the less accustomed to the English language would surely have missed. There is however to note some small imperfections in the translation skills, which could deceive you.
Be careful not to go KO
If on the one hand Punch Club is truly innovative thanks to its GDR component, on the other hand we soon find ourselves in front of the limits provided by management video games. In fact we will often find ourselves having to deal with a basic repetitiveness that will lead us to repeat the same actions for several days in a row during our strenuous workouts. The fights also come with some problems. Although these are well structured and provide accurate calculations on the probability of hitting and the damage we will carry out, they place us in front of a passive structure that does not allow us to interact in any way during their development. Our only interaction will only take place before the fight begins, where we will be asked to choose the best moves for our fighter to use.
Quotes to GO GO
As already mentioned before, Punch Club is strongly inspired by several films and TV series from the 80s and 90s, but not only. During your game you will be able to find several Easter Eggs. It will not be difficult to recognize characters like Apu, the attendant of the Jet Market of the Simpsons, Adriana, the wife of Rocky, and Mickey, the character played by Brad Pitt in The Snatch. It is also impossible not to notice the A-Team van inside the garage of our house. Precisely for this reason I believe that, considering all the quotations that go back to those years, using 8-bit graphics to create Punch Club was a great choice. However, if on the one hand the choice of using retro graphics could be a strong point for this game, on the other hand the use of such a bare soundtrack is at least limiting. In fact, we will find ourselves listening to the same four or five melodies throughout our journey and, in the long run, they will become almost annoying. However, this is a limit that can be easily overcome by completely lowering the volume of the music and using the most famous songs that have characterized the fighting films of the last forty years as a background.
