Train hard, fight crocodiles and find love. Earn your place in the Punch Club ranks, and discover who brutally murdered your father, in this choose your own adventure boxing management tycoon.
Punch Club is a boxing tycoon management game with multiple branching story lines. Your goal is clear, but how you get there depends on whether you want to legitimately climb the rankings, or take the more ridiculous, shady route.
Along the way you'll want to focus your talents. Will you take the Way of the Tiger, the Way of the Turtle, or the Way of the [other one?]? Your strength, accuracy and agility all depends on whichever Way enlightens your path. Do you have stripes, or flippers?
And every decision will matter, especially in your social life. You'll be juggling friendships, love life, work, recreational time, relationships, and possible stardom, all alongside your gym time and fighting aligators. It's not all just pumping iron, you know.
Punch Club features an interesting mix of management, social simulation and some JRPG elements in a game that features an interesting gameplay and whose 16-bit resemblances include several 90s pop culture references. It doesn't fully materialize its promises, as it quickly starts feeling repetitive and at one point, it doesn't quite feel interactive...
80s vibe and many movie references will keep you playing this game, but the large amount of grind and repetitive campaign will start to bore you sooner than you hoped for.
Although the concept of the game is pretty cool, Punch Club doesn't really provide a lot of entertainment. It does, however, inspire you to head to the gym and lift some real-life weights or perhaps run on a treadmill for an hour or so.
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's flagship console, it just feels a little too remote and repetitive to be in with a genuine title shout.
Under a beautiful art, Punch Club it's a life simulator under a sport management sim appearance. You have to manage your time to train, work, buy food, work on your relations, rest... and fight. It's a shame that combats are automatic: if they were playable, probably the game would have been more fun to play.
