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

A new expansion for Endless Legend, a 4X strategy game has been announced.

Named ‘Shifters’ it will include a new Major Faction called The Allayi, a race that can ‘shift’ during long winters. What this means is unknown but I guess we’ll discover eventually. All factions will also be able to collect a new resource called the ‘Pearls of Auriga’ – these combine with the ‘Altar of Auriga’ to allow you to unlock new powers and modify the upcoming winter’s impact. Seems the cold will be extremely relevant during the expansion.

This news was announced during a livestream celebrating the studio Amplitude’s fifth birthday and also came with the news that starting a new game of Endless Legend, Dungeons of the Endless and Endless Space will bag you a new character for each. This is only if you do it without mods and before the 25th though. So hurry if you want to take advantage of the offer!

With its release and beta upcoming at some point soon, more and more information on The Division is being released day by day. Now we’ve been told some specifics about features that will be included with the PC version of the game.

Creative director Magnus Jansén has been talking about the ways that PC players will be able to communicate in-game, with a text chat being available along side voice systems on the console.  In style the text-chat resembles your standard MMO-chat window that you’d see in a game like World of Warcraft or similar – but in The Division it’ll be a safehouse-only function from within hub areas.

“[The safe house is] also a social space where you can easily use your proximity voice, or on PC chat because on PC you obviously have a chat for group or local. [It’s a] classic MMO chat system which you can use to hook up with strangers.”

The idea is to aid the formation of groups in game and to build a community within the game. There’s also the proximity voice chat that can be used if you have a microphone to communicate.

The decision to restrict the text-chat to just the hub’s might be a good one, I don’t know of many people whose first action in an MMO isn’t to switch off the big main chat to stop it constantly scrolling through their chat box.

Bethesda have entered into a partnership with Japanese toymaker ThreeZero to produce a meticulously crafted and detailed Fallout 4 figurine of a player in a Power Armour frame.

However, as you might expect, such things do not come cheap. The price tag is set around $400, or in pounds about £279. Owch. However, compared to other figurines it’s actually quite cheap and international postage is also free. If that softens the blow of the price tag any, let me know…

It stands at 14.5 inches tall and is fully posable with 35 points of articulation, which include the fingers. The head can also swap for a helmet with LED light up function which requires batteries that aren’t included. The outer armour pieces are detachable and will be compatible with other upcoming Fallout 4 figures in power armour. Also an AER-9 Laser Rifle because.

Tempted? Pre-orders open on January 28. There are also loads of pictures over on the official site.

Hello and welcome to your weekly update on what awesome stuff you can find in Kickstarter’s gaming campaigns.

As always, we’ll start with some updates. There’s not much to update with only last week’s campaigns to catch up with, but half of last week’s campaigns were cancelled in the last week. Firstly Code War was cancelled after the developers listened to feedback suggesting they update their page with more content, but they have promised to tell us when they relaunch their campaign page so stay tuned for more. The other game to see cancellation is King of the Hill which has been called off for similar reasons as the developers call a ‘timeout’ to work on their game a bit more before they re-launch the campaign page.

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Ghost Theory

First up is a ghost hunting adventure made for VR, and that’s something I never saw myself writing this week.

Ghost Theory places you into haunted places with ghost hunting gear and challenges you to investigate their hauntings while evading the nasties residing there… and potentially eliminating the ghosties entirely. Stealth aspects are apparent as well as open-world mechanics and each location will have a backstory to discover. Sweet.

Ghost Theory has 27 days to go to make a £100,000 goal of which it has made £4,848 so far.

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Dread Bot Factory

Next up we have a game that take inspiration from two popular games of yesteryear – Megaman and Metroid.

Dread Bot Factory sets you in one big level and challenges you to open up different areas to reach bosses, customising your character AI to fight and for some other mysterious purpose that is not yet clear. It’s also possible with your customisation to play through the game in a number of different ways, so unless you try no two playthroughs should go exactly the same.

Dread Bot Factory has made kr400 SEK of its kr420,000 SEK goal and has 29 days to go.

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#FML

This is my weekly card game and it’s a party game about… tweeting?

#FML can last as many rounds as is decided upon and the point of the game is to have the fewest points at the end. To avoid points, you need to be the fastest to place a white card that matches the colour of the black card that is in play – or failing that use the hashtags on the cards to craft something funny, witty or insulting like you’d see on social media!

#FML has a goal of $13,500 of which it has made $295 with 27 days to go.

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Mission to Mars High Definition 3D Simulation Game

Lastly we have a game that is more about exploring than playing.

Mission to Mars will involve an accurate game-playable replica of the planet Mars in which you can explore. Develop your crew as you explore and make decisions that will lead to survival or death of those under your command as you play. The end goal seems to be terraforming a part of the planet for human life, but obviously that will take a long time and needs a lot more accomplished first!

Mission to Mars has made $2 of its $100,000 goal and has 29 days to go.