Some video games make my coronary heart bubble up with pleasure. They remind me of thumbing by way of tiny, stunning booklets and tag-teaming robust bosses with associates. Not everybody’s childhood was simple, easy, or glad, however all of us have moments in our lives we glance again fondly on and video games that briefly deliver them again to us. Panzer Paladin is a kind of for me, and the retro motion platformer is lastly getting a second likelihood on PlayStation and Xbox.
It was made by Tribute Video games, the indie crew behind 2022 GOTY contender Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Earlier than that, they had been finest identified for the puzzle RPG Wizorb and the run-and-gun side-scroller Mercenary Kings. The entire studio’s initiatives have showcased top-tier pixel-art and a flare for turning the basics of previous 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 accumulate large medieval weapons.
It’s structured like Mega Man with a stage choose display and boss fights on the finish of every stage. It borrows from Blaster Grasp in which you could 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 towards armored knights. What Panzer Paladin has that these video games don’t is a complicated breakable weapon system the place you accumulate 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 stage has optionally available 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 robust, 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 of, a reasonably hardcore throwback.
Its growth 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 person noticed coming. It launched solely on PC and Change, 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 deliver the sport to PlayStation or Xbox, leaving retro lovers 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 deliver Panzer Paladin to different platforms. If porting was as simple as copying and pasting some code, it might need occurred lots sooner, however Tribute works with a proprietary recreation engine and needed to deliver on outdoors 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 studies for some issues and there’s at all times the temptation to go, ‘Oh, we might appropriate this in a particular means, or we might add a characteristic to this,” Ray, a producer who helped coordinate the method, advised me in a current video interview. “However there’s additionally that little voice that claims we have to maintain it so simple as doable, so we get by way of 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 give attention to its subsequent mission. 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 we’ve a number of initiatives within the pipeline together with some ports,” publishing supervisor Eric Lafontaine advised me (a number of of the studio’s older video games like Wizorb aren’t on trendy consoles). He added that the crew is presently rising, a reassuring signal at a time when numerous 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 trendy tech. There’s no scarcity of attractive wanting retro video games on PC and console as of late, nevertheless it solely takes a couple of minutes with Panzer Paladin to see there’s far more to it than simply one other extremely GIF-able pixel artwork recreation. And one of many issues I now love most about it’s the means it’s brain-wormed its means into my very own nostalgia for the summer season of its authentic launch. 2020 was an absolute shit 12 months in so some ways. Taking part in Panzer Paladin provided transient moments of retro respite I nonetheless haven’t forgotten. And now it’s again with a Platinum Trophy on PS4.
