My thoughts on Punch Club 2 after 100% both games

[Blastaz]

So I absolutely loved Punch Club 1. I thought it was a really smart mix of pop culture references and game play loop. Punch Club 2 comes out and is an instant purchase. I've sunk 30 hours in it super fast and got all the achievements in just one run (well technically 2 as I needed to start a second game for five minutes to get the candy achievement that had bugged).

Punch Club 2 builds interestingly on the world of Punch Club 1, literally layering the story on the bones of the first city in the manner of Pentiment. It feels like it has something to say here, but I didn't quite get it. The world doesn't quite gel completely as it is unsure whether this is trying to parody Cyber Punk or the same 80s action movies the first game did. As a result the game feels slightly tonally discordant and not quite as satisfying as the previous. The ending is trippy as anything, while that succession of cut scenes all in a rush is an interesting story telling technique, I didn't like the way they leaned into the crazy elements of the DLC with the final reveal -although the villain was obvious and deserved to get punched. That said the humour was still there, it was a funny game to play.

Mechanically it feels like a step back almost. They replaced fan decryed stat decay with the tonus system that functionally is exactly the same. This time you need to run forwards to stand still not every day (which could be fixed quite easily with the stat stick skills) but merely after every single fight. To me this felt psychologically almost more limiting, especially as there were absolutely 0 non tonus skills in the advanced skill trees. My agi build used an awful lot of high kick till quite far through the game, and that felt really bad. A few improved non tonus skills scattered through the skill trees would be much better. Gold's training was useful, but super annoying as the cool down period for training was different from the buff length so you couldn't just keep the same 2/3 skills tonus free for the sake of a few hours training each day.

Lastly, despite the five year development time (a fact actually mocked in a fourth wall breaking scene) the final act of the game felt rushed. There is just less to do than in punch club 1, no reason to replay (all achievements in one run), the cop/gym jobs identical and able to do them both at once, the act 3 job being identical to the same job in act 2 being the real let down (compared to the foray into movies/ninjas of the original), and with no Russia/prison interlude. There seemed to be a lot of content in Chapter 2 where you could do both Cop/Gym jobs simultaneously as well as all three Chapter 1 jobs, compared to Chapter 3 where you could do only 1 job and given the high cost of fighting in the league money suddenly becomes a constraint again. Chapter 3 needs more content! That said the chapter "3.5" ending fight system was brilliant and has real potential for expansion/dlc turning everything into a puzzle with fixed resources.

Another mechanical problem is that most of the side quests give rubbish rewards, you don't get money, you don't get GPP, there is very little way to get Old Skool Cool points (what do you do for movies etc if you go cop? is there any reason to go cop?). You are just doing side quests for banter half the time and while the banter is funny they could offer a bit more.

Also the overwriting fixed saves to exit while you can still save multiple games is trash. I just started alt-f4 the entire time. Either have an iron man mode (which there isn't much need for given there's no fail state or time limit) or just let us save and reload as normal.

Overall I did like the game, and have mainlined it for a few days. But I'm not going to replay until more content, which was not true of 1.

[Blastaz]

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Having just played a little bit of punch club 1 again (apart from the fact that it said punch club 2 would come out in 2019 lol) I'm amazed that 2 actually has better graphics :)

considering it took 5 years to develop, would be amazing if it didn't

Given that the art direction is set somewhere between Streets of Rage 1 & 2 so about 1992, I wasn't expecting CPU improvement to be an issue!