The game sells itself as a sort of 'boxing RPG' or training sim, but all it is is watching meters fill and numbers go up while occasionally watching your character trade punches with a parody of a character from an action game or movie. If it were at least charming, it could get away with a lot, but the writing is stilted and mostly asinine. The game ends with a joke before the last battle you've been working towards, rendering the game utterly pointless even in its own context. The thing you're working towards never happens. It fails as a game, it fails as a parody, it even fails as a waste of time. It is barely a game. It is an interactive loading screen. Please do not buy Punch Club.
I didn't really enjoy my time with this game at all. It's presentation and everything is fine, but the energetic gameplay I kept hearing get lauded just wasn't there. On the medium difficulty, at least, you don't get nearly enough ammunition to deal with your enemies early on, forcing you to rely on a pitchfork, and a flare gun that takes three or four seconds to kill your enemy after hitting them, during which they can still shoot at you; and they do more damage than you can endure just running around. So basically you end up creeping around corners a lot, shooting individual cultists with a flare gun, and then hiding around a corner until they catch on fire. This is shaken up only by slowly poking zombies to death with a pitchform while walking backwards. The shotgun they give you doesn't have the range or damage to kill cultists efficiently, and zombies get back up three or four times when you 'kill' them with it, even though they stay down permenantly from tepid pitchfork prods. I dunno. Maybe this game is totally awesome later, but for me it was just slow paced and unfun. People like to talk about these games like you'll have an orgasm every time you click the fire button, but the reality is we've come a long way.
This game is clunky and wonderful, allowing you to permanently destroy Nazi installations throughout an occupied Paris France, and literally restore color to areas that were previously bathed in a black and white filter representing their despair. This has one of the best and most atmospheric ending sequences in any game, provided you don't shoot everybody involved.
