{"id":21513,"date":"2018-05-24T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/switch-eshop\/punch_club"},"modified":"2018-05-24T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-05-24T18:00:00","slug":"review-punch-club-switch-eshop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/2018\/05\/24\/review-punch-club-switch-eshop\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Punch Club (Switch eShop)"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"media_block\"><a href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/switch-eshop\/punch_club\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/switch-eshop\/punch_club\/small.jpg\" class=\"media_thumbnail\"><\/a><\/div>\n<div id=\"\">\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 1 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89797\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89797\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 1 of 4\"\/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>The idea of a fighting game in which you don&#8217;t actually do any fighting might sound like an odd one, but that&#8217;s precisely what you&#8217;ll find in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/games\/switch-eshop\/punch_club\"><strong>Punch Club<\/strong><\/a>. This is a conversion of a casual management simulator that started out life on PC and mobile before making its way to <a class=\"external\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nintendolife.com\/reviews\/3ds-eshop\/punch_club\">3DS<\/a> and other consoles last year.<\/p>\n<p>There have been no radical changes in the intervening months and years. After a brief intro outlining your character&#8217;s Daredevil-like origin story (minus the blindness and the superpowers), it&#8217;s on to training your young buck up to be an MMA champion. In practice, this means taking control of his entire life &#8211; working jobs, buying food, forming relationships &#8211; as well as training up your fledgling combat skills. Whatever mundane task you&#8217;re undertaking, however, it only ever lasts a few seconds, and involves virtually no direct input.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 2 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89798\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89798\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 2 of 4\"\/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Working a manual labour job involves pressing &#8216;A&#8217; to start, then again to finish. So too does sleeping at home and training at your local gym. Eating, meanwhile, requires a simple trip to the fridge, provided you bought the necessary fresh food at the supermarket. Punch Club spices up these mundane tasks with a dash of self-aware humour and an unashamed willingness to bathe in &#8217;80s and &#8217;90s pop culture. Whether you&#8217;re engaging in an impromptu scrap with a succession of sewer-dwelling mutant lizards or wooing a woman named Adrian, there are nods aplenty for the eagle-eyed (and just plain old). Sure, it&#8217;s a cheap and hackneyed way to buy your affection, but it&#8217;s effective.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever task you&#8217;re completing, though, your job boils down to watching a series of fluctuating stat bars representing your various levels, and then judging when enough is enough. Every activity essentially fills up some and empties others, with time given a crucial stat bar of its own. It&#8217;s an approach that carries through to the most important portion of Punch Club: training up your fighter. You can improve your brawler&#8217;s three core attributes &#8211; strength, agility and stamina &#8211; by using certain pieces of gym equipment. However, your abilities will degrade over time when you&#8217;re not exercising, so it&#8217;s best to reserve the really hard graft for the period just before your next fight.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 3 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89800\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89800\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 3 of 4\"\/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Given that time is a finite resource here, it&#8217;s a good idea to focus most of your efforts on one particular attribute. Specialisation is the key, and that&#8217;s driven home by the sprawling ability tree that gradually opens up to you. It&#8217;s only by really concentrating on one of three styles of fighting (each loosely mapping to one of those attributes) that you&#8217;ll be able to unlock the game&#8217;s more advanced combat techniques. All of which plays out in Punch Club&#8217;s fights, which offer the most intense and extended sections of the game. Don&#8217;t get me wrong, it&#8217;s still a case of pressing &#8216;A&#8217; and watching various bars move, but this time there&#8217;s the added bonus of watching two pixel-art jocks taking chunks out of each other.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say that there isn&#8217;t a certain amount of strategy to these fights, however, particularly as your ability-set expands. In between rounds you get to switch out your fighter&#8217;s active moves, so if they&#8217;re taking a beating from a heavy hitter you might want to add a block or dodge. If they&#8217;re running low on stamina relative to your opponent, you might consider swapping out that energy-sapping uppercut for a jab, or maybe adding a punishing leg kick that will bring your opponent down to your level.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s amazing how compelling watching the game&#8217;s crude scraps can become. Part of this is down to the fine 16-bit artwork and brilliant chiptune soundtrack, which combine to evoke the SNES era way better than most so-called retro efforts we see today. But it&#8217;s also down to the investment you&#8217;ve put into developing this character, and the unique imprint you end up putting on them. It&#8217;s a genuine role-playing experience.<\/p>\n<aside class=\"picture embed\"><a title=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 4 of 4\" href=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89799\/large.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/images.nintendolife.com\/screenshots\/89799\/900x.jpg\" alt=\"Punch Club Review - Screenshot 4 of 4\"\/><\/a><\/aside>\n<p>Ultimately, though, the sheer simplistic grind of the game&#8217;s core gameplay loop wears you down. There are only so many times you can perform the same hands-off tasks to bolster the same arbitrary numbers before you start to feel like a ninja-mask-wearing hamster in a wheel. Especially here on Switch, you can&#8217;t help but feel that it would benefit from more varied and tactile gameplay mechanics rather than simply asking you to sit back and watch the action unfold.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"conclusion\">\n<h2 class=\"heading\">Conclusion<\/h2>\n<p>Punch Club is an effective casual management sim with a well-observed 16-bit aesthetic, but its grindy hands-off mechanics soon start to grate. Here on Nintendo&#8217;s flagship console, it just feels a little too remote and repetitive to be in with a genuine title shout.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The idea of a fighting game in which you don&#8217;t actually do any fighting might sound like an odd one, but that&#8217;s precisely what you&#8217;ll find in Punch Club. This is a conversion of a casual management simulator that started out life on PC and mobile before making its way to 3DS and other consoles [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nintendo-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sickgaming.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}