Some video games make my coronary heart bubble up with pleasure. They remind me of thumbing via tiny, stunning booklets and tag-teaming powerful bosses with mates. Not everybody’s childhood was straightforward, easy, or completely happy, however all of us have moments in our lives we glance again fondly on and video games that briefly carry them again to us. Panzer Paladin is a type of for me, and the retro motion platformer is lastly getting a second probability on PlayStation and Xbox.
It was made by Tribute Video games, the indie group behind 2022 GOTY contender Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Earlier than that, they had been greatest identified for the puzzle RPG Wizorb and the run-and-gun side-scroller Mercenary Kings. The entire studio’s tasks have showcased top-tier pixel-art and a flare for turning the basics of outdated style classics into homages that appeared nice and felt novel. Following 2017’s Flint Hook, described early on as “Spider-Man with a gun,” Tribute launched Panzer Paladin, a 2D platformer the place you pilot a mech and acquire big medieval weapons.
It’s structured like Mega Man with a stage choose display and boss fights on the finish of every degree. It borrows from Blaster Grasp in that you would be able to exit your mech to navigate elements of the degrees as tiny pilot with a grappling hook. It performs like Zelda II, Nintendo’s one-off side-scrolling experiment that threw Hyperlink into tense 2D duels in opposition to armored knights. What Panzer Paladin has that these video games don’t is a complicated breakable weapon system the place you acquire swords, spears, axes and different lethal instruments as you play, even crafting your individual and sharing them on-line with different gamers.
There’s loads of spike pits however no Castlevania-style knockback hitting you into them, and each degree has elective checkpoints. The fight is crunchy, the degrees are imaginative, and the artwork is oozing with love, respect, and appreciation for the 8-bit period. However the boss fights are powerful, and there are undoubtedly some controller-throwing platforming sections. The nice and cozy fuzzy feeling you get from the retro nostalgia doesn’t cease Panzer Paladin from being, all issues thought-about, a reasonably hardcore throwback.
Its improvement additionally adopted a now unusual trajectory. Introduced in early 2019, Panzer Paladin was made in simply over a 12 months and got here out in the summertime of 2020, months into an unprecedented pandemic no one noticed coming. It launched solely on PC and Swap, with a free content material replace within the fall that added a leaderboard and problem ranges. On the time, Tribute stated there have been no plans to carry the sport to PlayStation or Xbox, leaving retro fanatics on these platforms out of luck.
With Shredder’s Revenge achieved and its DLC out final 12 months, the timing lastly lined as much as carry Panzer Paladin to different platforms. If porting was as straightforward as copying and pasting some code, it may need occurred quite a bit sooner, however Tribute works with a proprietary sport engine and needed to carry on exterior programming assist, in addition to navigate a byzantine platform certification course of that included ensuring server help for the sport’s user-generated content material—its player-crafted weapons—didn’t break on PlayStation or Xbox.
“You undergo certification and also you get bug reviews for some issues and there’s at all times the temptation to go, ‘Oh, we might appropriate this in a particular method, or we might add a characteristic to this,” Ray, a producer who helped coordinate the method, instructed me in a current video interview. “However there’s additionally that little voice that claims we have to maintain it so simple as potential, so we get via certification and we introduce much less danger of one thing breaking as a result of we modified one thing else.”
With that full, Tribute can now concentrate on its subsequent venture. Will or not it’s a one-game studio or is there room for one more Panzer Paladin-sized experiment in its future? “Proper now now we have a number of tasks within the pipeline together with some ports,” publishing supervisor Eric Lafontaine instructed me (a number of of the studio’s older video games like Wizorb aren’t on fashionable consoles). He added that the group is at present rising, a reassuring signal at a time when a number of different indie studios are going through extinction.
Within the meantime, Panzer Paladin is ripe for re-discovery like a long-lost NES cartridge juiced up on fashionable tech. There’s no scarcity of attractive wanting retro video games on PC and console lately, but it surely solely takes a couple of minutes with Panzer Paladin to see there’s rather more to it than simply one other extremely GIF-able pixel artwork sport. And one of many issues I now love most about it’s the method it’s brain-wormed its method into my very own nostalgia for the summer season of its unique launch. 2020 was an absolute shit 12 months in so some ways. Taking part in Panzer Paladin provided temporary moments of retro respite I nonetheless haven’t forgotten. And now it’s again with a Platinum Trophy on PS4.
