We have to apologize in advance. This isn’t going to be an overwhelmingly positive First Impressions review. This was an odd little duck, a sports management game (!) about training up a boxer and then setting him up in various bouts… which are simulated. You don’t actually play. You train and then send your boxer into the ring.
If you’re still with us, here’s how it works. You train your boxer in three primary stats by working out at a gym—strength, stamina, and agility. You can buy different combat techniques to upgrade your character, and then assign those new abilities to the character before sending him to fight.
The problem here is that… we didn’t see the point. Truly, why bother? The fights went on forever and there was nothing for you as the player to do, because you’d already chosen your stats and trained the character, so if things were going poorly, you just had to sit back and take it, and try to figure out what the best way would be to defeat your opponent next time. Which we never figured out, because the demo didn’t really explain how any of that worked.
Maybe folks who love games that are literally just resource management would enjoy this title, but it was a bust on our end. Apparently, the game has a very strong story (which we didn’t experience at all), great characters (again, what?), and a variety of paths for you to follow as the manager. These are all elements that weren’t part of the demo, so there may be depth there that we didn’t even get a taste of.
Are there awesome elements to Punch Club? Apparently the internet thinks so, but we didn’t get any of that. If you have exciting stuff to feature, bring that to the forefront, otherwise we’re going to tell our readers to leave a game behind… as we’re doing right now. Sorry, Punch Club, but you’ve K.O.’d our interest on this one.
