Shaun Munro reviews Pankapu…
With more than a dozen new Nintendo Switch games landing on the eShop every week as of late, it can be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff, and moreover, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for retro-style platformers in particular to differentiate themselves in such a crowded market.
Pankapu, a love-letter to the action-platformers of the 80s and 90s, may not quite rise to the top of the pack, but it is nevertheless another welcome, unexpectedly content-rich genre romp that’ll have you swearing at your many, many deaths, and shamelessly fist-pumping when you finally reach the next glorious checkpoint.
In the grand tradition of classic platformers, Pankapu‘s plot and characters are wafer-thin and will exit your memory nearly the second they’re hurled at you. Basically, the story unfolds as a fable playing out in the dreams of a child, Djaha’rell, who envisions himself as the titular brave warrior, who must protect the land of his dreams from a nightmarish invasion that takes hold there.
It’s absolute standard fare material for the genre, but the game smartly doesn’t waste much time on it at all, and even the brief slivers of exposition dumped on the player throughout the game are typically less than a minute apiece (if you skip through them, I wouldn’t blame you).
Pankapu is instead all about its devilishly tense, sometimes Switch-hurlingly infuriating platforming gameplay. What begins simply enough with your typical timed jumps and two-hit enemies quickly becomes increasingly complex, as Pankapu receives nifty new upgrades, but must also use them on more complex and fiendish enemies.
To the game’s considerable credit, it manages to keep gameplay relatively varied throughout its 8-10 hour campaign (the Switch version contains both of the currently released episodes), constantly changing-up locales and introducing new wrinkles. Though Pankapu is only able to jump and slash at the beginning of the game, he is eventually able to phase through enemies and obstacles, double jump, freeze his enemies, and even pilot a spaceship on occasion, among many other skills.
This gives the game a sure “one more checkpoint” quality, which also leads us to one of the game’s main bugbears; checkpoint spacing can be hair-pullingly challenging at times, requiring more repetition than most players would surely like.
There are also a number of moments throughout that’ll no doubt have players calling the game cheap, where obstacles and one-hit kill attacks emerge out of nowhere, sending you all the way back to the beginning. This is especially the case during some of the game’s more gruelling boss battles, which demand running the gauntlet for several minutes at a time without dying. If you do get stuck, though, you can replay previous levels and unlock hidden objects which will add more blocks to your health bar.
Ludicrous difficulty spikes aside, Pankapu is another reminder of just how well-suited indie platformers are to the Switch, because even when a boss killed me for the twentieth time, I was compelled to keep pressing ahead until I finally won the day. While not an especially charming game from a narrative perspective, its slick 2D visuals have a pleasantly simplistic allure to them, even if the use of music is unfortunately quite lacking.
When the game released on PS4 shortly before it landed on the Switch, many players complained of performance issues such as stuttering and hitching, which in bad cases can essentially be the kiss of death for a platforming game requiring extremely precise inputs such as this. It’s worth mentioning that the performance issues do also abound on the Switch version in some capacity, especially during its more busy and ambitious second-half, though the frame-rate drops thankfully don’t massively impact one’s ability to get the job done.
While Pankapu may not be up to much new for the genre – with its collectathon obsession it’s especially reminiscent of Rayman: Legends – it is an entertaining addition to the Switch’s library of oft-punishing platformers for more adult players. If you get into collecting the game’s array of goodies, not to mention the Time Attack mode that eventually unlocks, you can easily get around 20 hours out of this, which for the current £10.99 price tag is an absolute bargain.
It’s hard to call this a must-own Switch title, but if you’re looking for something to steal away some of your time while you wait for Super Mario Odyssey, you could do far, far worse.
Pros:
+ Sharp retro visuals
+ Addictive, deceptively nuanced gameplay
+ A surprising amount of content for the price
Cons:
– Some frustrating checkpointing
– Forgettable music and general sound
– Performance issues are mildly irritating
Rating: 7/10
Reviewed for Nintendo Switch (also available for PS4, Xbox One and PC)
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more video game rambling.
