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  1. Punch Club from developer Lazy Bear Games and publisher tinyBuild takes an unusual approach to the fighting game genre—you don't actually fight at all in this game! Punch Club is a sim game and challenges you with balancing work with training to become the next champion boxer. Along the way there are a variety of side quests and branching paths that can make each playthrough unique. The concept of the game represents a fun combination of sim and fighting game elements, but in practice the game falls into an incredibly repetitive grind. It turns out training to be a champion fighter isn't all that fun. This game loves the 80s. As a boxer training to become a champion the similarities to Rocky are easily apparent, but there are tons of other pop culture references to films, comics, and games mostly from the 80s, the heyday of stories about strongmen fighting their way to glory. And Punch Club is smart enough to not take this kind of storyline too seriously. The writing is full of humor and the soap operatic twists in the plot are more comical than dramatic. And to be fair to the developers it is rather impressive that they included branching story elements since at first glance this isn't the type of game where you'd expect to find such attention to detail. On the other hand the game is littered with typos, but we can overlook those when the game's writing is focused on pop culture humor. Like other sim games the main challenge of Punch Club is in balancing your time effectively so you're never too low on money, health, hunger, or sleep. And to become a great fighter you'll need to hit the gym regularly to build up strength, agility, and stamina. Once you win fights you can also customize your fighter through four skill trees to focus on one stat and unlock more powerful attacks or helpful passive effects. The game doesn't do a great job of explaining things when you first start off though, so there's an added layer of difficulty in figuring out what is actually useful to you as a fighter and what will be wasting your time. In fact, the game throws so many elements at you in the first few days that new players will most likely be genuinely lost for a while. Once you find a rhythm of work, training, and taking on side quests the game starts to feel a little more rewarding, but be prepared to work through some confusing moments at first. What makes Punch Club particularly difficult though, and also rather tiresome after a while, is stat decay. For each day that passes in-game your strength, agility, and stamina stats will go decrease (the higher the stat, the more it decreases). This can be a real pain at first since your time and money are so limited that essentially any decay is a huge setback for your fighting career, and even later on once you've established a strong regimen the looming problem of stat decay means you're kind of stuck doing the same thing day in and day out, even moreso than other sim games. The need to train regularly may be fairly realistic for a professional fighter but it doesn't make Punch Club fun—it just turns the entire game into an endless grind. It certainly doesn't help that most everything in the game is automated, i.e. you select a task and your fighter just does it with no further button input from you, even when you fight. You'll select your attack commands at the beginning of each round but after that you just watch the fight unfold which can be extremely frustrating at times when your character performs poorly and there's nothing you can do about it. Thankfully you can at least hold ZR to speed up the fight but it's still an unfortunate combination of dull and frustrating to watch fights unfold. And sadly Punch Club suffers from some technical issues as well. There are general bugs in the experience that can disrupt the gameplay in minor ways, but there are also significant problems that can completely stall your progress. At that point it hardly seems worth struggling through the game's long grind again. On the bright side there is an easy mode in this version of Punch Club which eliminates stat decay, which reduces a large part of the game's grind. The charm of training daily/balancing your other life goals is still tepid at best but easy mode really is a much less tiring experience. With all of its references to the 80s it's fitting that the graphics are quite retro as well—not quite as simple as 80s game design, but the pixel artwork definitely evokes a sense of the past. They're definitely charming in their own way but at the same time there's not a lot that is particularly unique in the art design either. The scenery is well detailed but the characters have a bland stiffness to their movements. The music also has some suitably nostalgic vibes but also lacks a unique hook to make it stand out—if anything it just starts to sound droning as you work through the grind of the game day in and day out. Punch Club takes a big swing on a unique combination of gameplay elements, but the hit doesn't quite connect. The number of side stories and options is impressive and the pop culture references are fun to spot, but the grind that the core mechanics are based around, particularly a grind that plays itself most of the time, overshadows almost all of that. At the end of the day Punch Club feels more like work than play, with only a minimal sense of satisfaction as you rise through the boxing ranks. Rating: 5 out of 10 Punches Review copy provided by the publisher Punch Club is available now on the Switch eShop for $14.99.
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