Some video games make my coronary heart bubble up with pleasure. They remind me of thumbing by means of tiny, stunning booklets and tag-teaming robust bosses with associates. Not everybody’s childhood was simple, easy, or comfortable, however all of us have moments in our lives we glance again fondly on and video games that briefly convey 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 have been greatest recognized 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 The entire studio’s tasks have showcased top-tier pixel-art and a flare for turning the basics of outdated style classics into homages that regarded nice and felt novel.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 large medieval weapons.
It’s structured like Mega Man with a stage choose display screen and boss fights on the finish of every stage. It borrows from Blaster Grasp in which you can exit your mech to navigate components 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 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 stage has non-obligatory 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 fairly 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 completely on PC and Change, with a free content material replace within the fall that added a leaderboard and problem ranges. On the time, Tribute mentioned there have been no plans to convey the sport to PlayStation or Xbox, leaving retro fans 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 convey Panzer Paladin to different platforms. If porting was as simple as copying and pasting some code, it might need occurred quite a bit sooner, however Tribute works with a proprietary sport engine and needed to convey on exterior programming assist, in addition to navigate a byzantine platform certification course of that included ensuring server assist 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 stories for some issues and there’s all the time the temptation to go, ‘Oh, we might right this in a selected approach, or we might add a function to this,” Ray, a producer who helped coordinate the method, advised me in a latest video interview. “However there’s additionally that little voice that claims we have to hold it so simple as potential, so we get by means 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 undertaking. Will it’s a one-game studio or is there room for an additional 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 advised me (a number of of the studio’s older video games like Wizorb aren’t on trendy consoles). He added that the group is at the moment 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 trendy tech. There’s no scarcity of beautiful wanting retro video games on PC and console as of late, however 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 sport. And one of many issues I now love most about it’s the approach it’s brain-wormed its approach 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 transient moments of retro respite I nonetheless haven’t forgotten. And now it’s again with a Platinum Trophy on PS4.
