I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. The problem is that the main core loop is very repetitive, super grindy, and is no fun at all. The main character walks super slowly, so most of your time you sit and watch him walk from fridge to gym, slowly. Once in the gym, you have to click on various excercies and wait until he repeats it for the n-th time. And that is about it. It takes time to level him up. Other than that, the graphics look really nice!
Punch Club is a management game with a background story.
Carefully choose daily actions to balance between income, rest, training in order to build skills and stats to become a better fighter and advancing the story line as you go. Choose your skill tree wisely as this will determine your success in combat. Focus on one main stat and a secondary one, do not attempt to raise all three.
Sadly the interface falls a bit short and is not exactly appropriate for this kind of gameplay: the buttons you have to click are moving around from one screen to the next making it impossible to just click in place, you have to move the pointer around before being able to click making the repetitive part of the game slow and annoying. No keyboard shortcuts either.
There are bugs, from minor to highly annoying. Sometimes you just cannot click anything anymore, sometimes a badly initialized variable will trigger a difficult endurance fight instead of the end combat and from there you'll have a robot in every screen and every combat will turn into an endurance fight against robots. Luckily quitting and reloading would clear this bug.
The gameplay evolves as the story line advances, at first you struggle to make money, by the end you have so much money that you do not need to rest anymore and indulge in loads of energy drinks instead. Some element such as maintaining the girlfriend relationship by giving gifts is very basic when it could have used a more realistic mechanism like the one with her brother (you have to chill or help with repairing his car to unlock the useful actions).
Locations and characters are mostly borrowed from popular culture (TMNT, hollywood movies, etc.) a double edged sword, by borrowing too much the game lacks its own identity. Not to mention that most of the places and characters will be mostly useless throughout the game, and going there / talking again to them is a waste of time.
The ending being really botched and does not do justice to the storyline
This is one addictive game. Basically this is you Rocky and all other fighter character from the 80's manager. It'a pretty simple - work, train, eat, train more and win fights. There is also a mystery to solve and some strategic decisions to make. Overall a great and fun experience that will take roughly 15 hours, if you are dedicated and know what you are doing.
Now the drawbacks - it can be a grind, especially at the beginning and in the late game, where
you have to spend a lot of time training and working to get your stats up enough to win against the tougher opponents.
Aside from that, I wholly recommend it. If not for the cool style, than for all the pop culture references.
Great game to focus on and also a great game to click alongside your daily stuff. Get it, but expect some slow moments.
