Some video games make my coronary heart bubble up with pleasure. They remind me of thumbing by tiny, lovely booklets and tag-teaming robust bosses with associates. Not everybody’s childhood was straightforward, easy, or completely satisfied, 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 type 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 group 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. All the studio’s initiatives have showcased top-tier pixel-art and a flare for turning the basics of previous style classics into homages that seemed 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 big 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 that you could 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 in opposition to 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 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 yr 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 mentioned there have been no plans to deliver the sport to PlayStation or Xbox, leaving retro fanatics on these platforms out of luck.
With Shredder’s Revenge executed and its DLC out final yr, the timing lastly lined as much as deliver Panzer Paladin to different platforms. If porting was as straightforward as copying and pasting some code, it may need occurred rather a lot sooner, however Tribute works with a proprietary sport engine and needed to deliver on outdoors 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 reviews for some issues and there’s at all times the temptation to go, ‘Oh, we might right 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 hold it so simple as doable, so we get by certification and we introduce much less threat of one thing breaking as a result of we modified one thing else.”
With that full, Tribute can now concentrate on its subsequent mission. Will 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 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 dealing with 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 beautiful trying retro video games on PC and console nowadays, 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 means it’s brain-wormed its means into my very own nostalgia for the summer time of its unique launch. 2020 was an absolute shit yr in so some ways. Enjoying Panzer Paladin supplied temporary moments of retro respite I nonetheless haven’t forgotten. And now it’s again with a Platinum Trophy on PS4.
