Punch Club is without a doubt the best boxing/fighting sim with a great storyline and numerous RPG elements that I’ve ever played. The fact that it’s also the only one shouldn’t detract from that honor at all.
It’s good enough that a sequel would be an obvious and welcome move, and that’s precisely what Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild are working on serving up. Said sequel will be titled Punch Club 2: Fast Forward — because it’s set in the future ya’ll — will be headed our way sometimes in 2017.
The developers who make up Lazy Bear revealed their new project in one of the most interesting ways possible, discussing it during a 26-minute documentary about the making of the first Punch Club. You can watch the whole thing below if you want to know how they felt about the process of making a game, why it’s good to have a publisher set deadlines, what they learned from the whole Twitch Plays Punch Club stunt and much more.
Toward the end, they mention how they hope to ensure Punch Club 2 is free of the things that players of the first game complained about. One of those aspects was stat decay — in other words, how your fighter’s attributes decrease without the proper balance of training mixed in with all of the other things you have to do. It’s an integral part of the gameplay, and it’s hard to imagine Punch Club without it.
Yet Lazy Bear is giving fans a chance to do exactly that thanks to a new Easy Mode which has been added to the PC version of the game only (sorry mobile gamers). The devs actually advise against playing Punch Club that way since it makes the experience too easy, but at least no one can say they aren’t listening to the fans.
Punch Club 2 will be designed without stat decay, and the studio says we can expect more details on it around PAX South, which takes place in late January. Until then, you can grab the original for either iOS or Android for just $0.99, which ranks as one of the finest ways you can spend a buck.
