Punch Club was a game that showcased what today's digital tools can do for the promotion of a game. Its developers, Lazy Bear Games promoted it through the use of a special Twitch channel - TwitchPlaysPunchClub and set the community a challenge. If they could beat the game then Lazy Bear Games would release the game, otherwise we'd have to wait until January 25th. Estimating a week would be needed, the community managed to get through the game in 36 hours and so Punch Club was released.
Punch Club is a retro-themed game mix of management, strategy and fighting with a point and click interface. Retailing at £6.99 in the UK and $9.99 in the US for the Standard Edition and £10.59 or $13.99 for the Deluxe Edition (with included artbook and OST DLC), it involves you having to train your character to be the best fighter in the area along with having to discover who murdered your father in front of you as a child during a street brawl.
It draws on a lot of tropes from the 80s style of films with a supposed underdog hero who was taken in by a non-parental figure as a child after losing his father (god knows where the mother went), and after a street brawl is given an offer of training from a jaded old fight promoter who sees 'potential' in him. There's quite a few 80s film references in the background of the locations you can visit too with the most obvious one being the 'Stoney' posters you can see in the background of your garage and the gym.
The game mainly consists of following events around in between keeping your HP, Energy, Hunger and Mood bars as high as possible to ensure that you're in good shape for the fights that you can sign up to do every few days. You can get better at fighting by training your stats, which consist of just three - Strength, Agility and Stamina. Raising all 3 is difficult and in the fact the game itself encourages you to concentrate your efforts into just 1 or maybe 2 of the 3. You also need to go work some jobs to earn money so that you can afford to buy food to eat and train at the gym, as well as to buy new equipment to train at home once you discover the Sports Goods store.
Fights themselves consist of a before-round part where you line up the skills you want to use and then the Fight itself in which each round plays out automatically as you let the computer take the wheel for you. That in itself does seem a little bit odd in a game about fighting but it's not overly bothersome. Win or lose you will earn Skill points that you can then use to unlock new skills and moves in your skill tree.
Now while this game runs smoothly and I only experienced one crash that was the result of my clicking things too fast for the game to keep up, I have to say that after working out a routine to maintain my fighter's health and growth the game became... repetitive. Events do happen that lead to new encounters, new locations and a story development but they do seem to happen all too infrequently and the build up of your stats is slightly hampered by the fact that at the end of the day you lose a little of the progress you've made towards your next stat level; more the higher your stat. While the loss of progress and the need to keep training to improve the stats over time is certainly realistic it does kind of make you possibly want to go play something else after a few hours of it.
Punch Club is certainly not a bad game by any means, and it does a lot of stuff well. It just seems to be more suited for short bursts of gameplay rather than extended sessions; if you're someone who has only a little time each day to dedicate to gaming this is certainly one you should be looking at.
7/10