Review - Punch Club 2 - Bigger Not Always Is Better

 

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Welcome to a new installment of the story of The Chronicles Of A Gamer.

This time we tried a new genre for the page, a Management/Tycoon of hand to hand combats.

I personally played the first one a couple of times and no doubt had it's problems but nothing that was a wall for me to don't enjoy the game.

TL;DR Section

Chronicles Conclusion:

Mildly Recommended

Pros:

Improve almost all of PC1 

No decay of stats

Lots of new builds

Diverse jobs and ways of getting stronger

Interesting story but slower than necessary

Old characters reappear with new features

Cons:

Story progress is all over the place, sometimes happens a lot in brief time and sometimes don't happen anything for a few hours

Combat is far to punishing with energy(even with resistance build)

At the end we have to stick to the strongest movements and hope that we can overcome the energy lackness because some builds don't work well

Ending has loose ends and wraps up abruptly

We don't have a heads up before entering the final stage of the game so we can lose some achievements and content without previous saves( I losed one behind the wall of more than 20 hours of progress by simply talking to someone, that could have been easily dodged by an previous advice)

Brief resume:

We have a good game but the story starts pretty interesting but the more I advanced the less I was interested, the ending is pretty bad and a lot of content is highly repetitive from mid to late game, good characters writting, side stories are good and the humor & old action movies throwbacks are pretty well achieved.

The HUD is clean but the combat animations remain as plain and simple as the previous entry

The Story:

This game has a peculiar way of progressing the story, with the same mistakes and hits that the first one.

We start with a little background about the world where we are, a explanation of the mechanics and here we go to the unexplored city (By us and the Protagonist).

First of all we know that our father is the protagonist of the previous game and we have some throwbacks from the prequel, then we are on our own.

Landing a job, training, sleeping and fighting, our journey starts by balancing every aspect of the life of our dude, fastly we start getting into some drama with the story and meeting new and old characters.

Old Bobo are one of the first characters that we meet and now as a job boss, interesting character development

If you saw the trailers you know that Apu from the store, Casey, Bill, Silver and a lot others come back in new ways, special mention of our pal Mick.

The story is divided the same way as the first one, we have chapters and a "timer" that we can control, I mean the way of climbing chapters are by winning the respective fighting league so we can decide when fight for the championship and turn the page.

Sadly this mechanics has the same flaws as the first PC, for example you can easily skip a couple of fights that diverge on side stories and some are interesting.

To avoid this you have to fight every fighter of the league without getting so much higher than the average so you can keep climbing one by one.

Yeah, almost every fighter is a glimpse to some pop culture representative or 80s heroes

The Gameplay & Mechanics:

There's little to say about the gameplay, we are in a point and click adventure with management of a fighter life instead of a company.

We control our character in a 2.5D upside down like view but everything work as a Point& click, your only real time control is walking around the different scenarios.

You have to watch three bars for the complete length of the game, food, energy and health, and a fourth special one, rage.

The easter eggs are on point

The food and energy work the same, a limitation for doing actions and recovers in a common sense way, eating and resting.

Some food can restore energy, like energy bars, drinks or sodas and also others focuses on recovering a large amount of hunger and health.

In the same way resting consume hunger but recovers some health and the time passes more fast as you're asleep, nothing so complex.

The rage affects how much stats you gain in training and also low rage net some bad side effects like only can fill 75% of the other bars

As you can see or if you didn't play the first one, all these aspects works practically the same, but we have to explain a final aspect that covers the fights.

The Combat:

Our energy bar in the moment of a combat affects how much energy we will have and the health works as your hit points, nothing hard. 

There's also buffs that you can get for the fights, things like stats buffs, better regeneration of energy or more health, dodge % or damage.

Also the upgrades works almost the same as before, instead of skill points we have different "old school and good person points" that works on different branchs of the skills tree.

A certain character offers the mean of seeing old school movies and giving him tapes to unlock more, this 80s action movies let's us buy new passive perks all being references of icons of action of the old era.

The other branches works the same, we unlock movements getting stats to the requirements of the move or perk and buy them in a line, and by winning fights and doing certain missions we get these points.

Every gear focus on a primary stat and the rest are less gains or zero gains at all

Fighting comes to a card fight, you choose a build, a style and movements for every round and this game has a precise timing on creating builds to counter rivals.

This game in my opinion is way harder than the first one, the enemies are much stronger and we are "debuffed" on the energy on my opinion, a couple of hours in and I almost automatically detected this problem.

It's not that the game is completely impossible on certain point, but the punishment of the energy is so brutal that on later stages getting to zero energy means almost always a lose and the rivals are way more durable on this aspect.

You have a lot of options for personalization, every style has peculiar skills and counters certain styles

The combat are complex in the builds that you can make but the more you play the more that you determine that is practically the same as the first.

A lot of it is RNG and focusing on one stat is a must for reaching a level in the later game to be competitive so the combinations aren't the best way to get higher.

Sometimes you can play the same and win or lose by pure luck, this decrease dramatically the more you advance through the game but don't disappear completely.

The humor is some of the best the game has to offer

My Opinion:

I don't want to talk beyond the first couple of characters because I don't want to ruin the few surprises this game has hidden but starts pretty interesting.

Presents a lot of people and give the feeling of lots of content but almost the 80% remain as plan as a sheet of paper, a lot of loose ends and characters that appears as something and then disappear abruptly or nothing more happens.

We have continue contact with different factions but at the end this don't lead nowere so for me the game left me a huge feel of disappointment but I don't think is a bad game so keep that in account.

Also from middle game to beyond the game has the exact same mistakes as PC1, the grindfest is atrocious and a lot of times I left the game on the side for another more interesting option because the game goes around in circles between the second and third league.

The story extends a lot but I prefer quality to quantity

The Conclusion:

I skipped a lot of little gimmicks like the different ways of training and the software that you can install, also things like the "services" some people can provide like winning more points in leagues or getting more proficient on certain trainings, all for the sake of impressions.

To resume everything, I don't think that is a bad game, more like a far more ambicious proposal than the pack that they could made so in the end we get a lot of promises and content but following the quantity over quality that I personally don't like.

A lot of things starts and ends abruptly like they had other ideas but never implemented them so strikes as strange and disappointing but overall is a fun and better round game than the first one (The story of the first is better on my opinion but subjective to be fair)

The scenarios are full of life and feels like a good visual stimulation

Anyway thanks for reaching the end, this was a tough game for reviewing but I hope that you liked it and at least read the criticized points but also the explanations to understand how I reached those points.

Thanks for reading and we see you on the next one!

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