Normally I review games but sometimes a game just beats me down so badly that I can’t get any further and just can’t compel myself to fight with the game any longer. So rather than call this look at indie brawler Fist Puncher a review, I’ll just call it impressions.

Fist Puncher is a game that likens itself to old-school 2D side-scrolling brawlers like  River City Ransom. The similarities are clear in terms of the brawling gameplay and integration of RPG elements. However, Fist Puncher can be downright painful to play.

Let’s start with the good things. There are a lot of characters and levels for you to play. By the end of the game, you should have 15 characters and 50 levels unlocked. That doesn’t include the zombie horror survival mode. There’s plenty of variety in the game to keep you interested as you progress through the game and you’re certain to get your money’s worth from the game.

I’m also a fan of the RPG elements. As you level up, you earn skill points to improve your character. It’s kind of a necessity for reasons I’ll get to later. The draw back is these skill points and level ups only work for the character you earn them for. So if you play through with one character and want to switch, that new character is only a Level One character.

Combat is sort of in the middle of good and bad. I basically used three buttons: the A key for punching, the S key for my character’s special attack, and the D key for stomping on enemies on the ground and grabbing weapons. I know that old school brawlers didn’t have a lot of buttons but I think that the controls are a little basic. I like how simple it is to mash A and S until your enemies are dead but there’s not a lot of depth there.

Unfortunately, the combat is repetitive and poorly balanced. For the majority of a level, you get to do battle with henchmen. They don’t do a lot of damage and aren’t particularly dangerous but they do come at you in large numbers. We’re talking about dozens of them over the course of a level before you get to a boss. It gets a bit dull and repetitive and that’s after completing eight levels.

So why have I completed only the eight levels? Because the balance of the boss fights is terrible. Bosses take almost no damage from your normal and special attacks (one boss too between 0 and 1 point of damage from my attacks). In return, they can kill you in about four hits if you are unable to heal. Sure, you can dodge or block the boss’ attacks but some of them spam moves so it gets to the point where you just can’t react quickly enough to save yourself or just stop caring and let the inevitable happen.

And that’s why this is only an impressions post rather than a review. I keep grinding previous levels to earn skill points to level up my character but grinding through the same eight levels to beat two impossible bosses is not my idea of fun. I want to play a game not eight levels of monotony so I can get to the other 42 levels promised me.

I also have an issue with the visuals. I’m not sure whether the game’s visuals would be best classified as 8-bit or 16-bit. It’s looks better than 8-bit but the character visuals aren’t something you would mistake for 16-bit quality. Heck, the character visuals lack the charm of both classic 8-bit and modern 8-bit games. It’s probably closer to 9-bits than anything. Marginally better than 8-bit in detail but those player character models could have used some work.

Conclusion

I really wanted to have fun playing Fist Puncher. Watching Jesse Cox’s preview video about the game made me think that I would have fun playing this game. I just couldn’t have fun with this one. Maybe if the bosses weren’t so terribly balanced compared to the rest of the enemies you face, it would be an enjoyable game.

I’m not a great gamer but getting through less than 20% of the game is a bit unacceptable. If I was getting my arse kicked left, right and centre by this game, I could understand getting stuck at some point. However, the only place I get stuck is at two bosses. Somehow, all the rest are beatable without too much effort. Getting your ass kicked isn’t fun when there’s no end in sight regardless of how much grinding you do.