As someone who enjoyed Disney/Pixar’s Turning Red and its depiction of giant red pandas last year, I jumped at the chance to review Panda Punch, a 2D puzzle platformer from Ninja Rabbit Studios featuring a cute red panda protagonist. I should not have done that. Panda Punch successfully captures the look and sound of a 16-bit platformer and nothing more. It’s a game going through the motions, doing little to set itself apart from its influences or its contemporaries and dragging players along with it through its trudge of a campaign.
Player’s play as Veep, a cute red panda whose world is under siege from an alien threat. During the attack, Veep is injured and gains a mechanical arm from his father. With a nasty punch behind his new arm, Veep decides to take his world back, one level at a time. There is barely any story or character to really discuss here. Panda Punch is so light on character development, that Veep’s father is simply named Veep’s Father. To be fair, similar titles, old and new, rarely focus on plot or character.
While details are light surrounding characters like Sonic or Mega Man, especially in their earlier titles, we’re at least given enough about each of them to make us care about their adventure. Veep and his metal arm paint the picture of a character who’s suffered loss and who is ready to fight back. My issue with Veep’s motivations is that we’re fighting a faceless alien horde. Sonic has Eggman, Mega Man has Wiley. Veep having that direct opposition would go a long way in making me care about what is going on.
Not that what’s going on is all that interesting. There are 58 levels in Punch Panda’s campaign split up across four biomes. Completing a level requires players to unlock paths by placing crates on buttons, navigating obstacles and platforming, and fighting off enemies. This loop hits a wall very early in the game’s run and stops being fun almost immediately. This is magnified by the fact that new power ups are only given out after defeating one of the four bosses, each of which have 15 levels between them. That’s 15 levels of repeating the same actions and fighting the same enemies. The levels get longer the further into a biome you get, dragging these chores out even further.
The game’s poor pacing is made even worse with lackluster power ups that should have been introduced much earlier in the game. You don’t get the power to carry boxes (yep that’s the power) until you’ve completed the first 15 levels. I had the most fun in Panda Punch with the ground pound. A punch that gives your base jump a boost, and also lets you punch down on enemies, but again, this is a power I didn’t get until the back half of the game.
The level design of Punch Panda leaves a lot to be desired. Some levels are labyrinths, with multiple buttons and blocked paths spread throughout the level. The game is advertised as a puzzle platformer, but a lot of the puzzles are simply, “how do I get this button to this crate?” It’s also not always clear what crate goes to what button. A few times I found myself carrying a crate down multiple levels, just to discover that there was a closer crate I could use for that button. Making things worse, that crate that I just gave a grand tour of the level to, would have to be carried back up to its actual button. In these cases, I found it easier to just restart the level, instead of struggling with the slower traversal of Veep while carrying a crate.
Punch Panda looks great. It does a great job of looking like something you’d play on a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis, and the music also fits in perfectly. While it looks and sounds great, there is a lack of variety across both areas. As mentioned, there are four biomes, but you’d be forgiven for struggling to find a difference between them aside from the name of the biome and the biome’s music. The backgrounds, layouts, and enemies across these levels do very little to set each biome apart from one another. The most variety comes in the form of the bosses, of which each is some form of robot. These fights are fine, but they end way too fast, forcing you right back into the uninspired levels.
The Nintendo Switch version of Punch Panda has its fair share of bugs. On a few occasions, crates would get stuck on ledges, bosses flew off-frame and would fail to come back to the battle, and punches would not connect to enemies properly. Some of these would require loading up a recent checkpoint to progress. Speaking of checkpoints, there were issues with some checkpoint flags not registering that I had crossed them. Another bug, which only activates when you haven’t crossed a checkpoint and try to load the last checkpoint, would load me right back into my current area with a full health bar. It’s not the worst bug in the world, but it’s fair to say the game could use some polishing.
Panda Punch looks good but looks are only resolution deep. With its uninspired level design and lackluster pacing, bored players will find little reason to stay around for the full experience.
