Punch Club 2: Fast Forward – What Difficulty Should You Choose

Choice of Difficulty

I beat the game on Normal but I’d recommend Easy for new players

I know this is totally personal preference, but those of us that played in the early days of Punch Club 1 remember when the devs begrudgingly added an easy mode complete with an in-game snarky description of the mode essentially throwing shade at those begging for an easy version.

Here’s the thing, though. I was one of those people. The art style, premise, animation, writing, and overall loop was a blast to play, but there were things like degrading stats that made the game less of a management sim and a lot more like pissing in the wind. It didn’t make the game harder, it made the game longer, and less fun for me and others. I know some people will say I needed to git gud or it’s “supposed” to be hard but it depends on one’s definition of hard. I mean, someone could say using a rake to rake leaves on a football field is hard, but for me that’s just a pain in the ass; it’s laborious, boring, and mindless without being particularly hard from a strategy or skill standpoint.

Punch Club 2: Fast Forward introduces “tonus” which is basically separate energy bars for each individual stat (STR, AGI, STA) that get depleted as you use specific moves throughout a fight. This bar does not replenish between rounds and once it runs out you need to remove/replace those skills before you can fight in the next round. So how do you replenish it? Well, when you start working out it’s basically a buffer before you can improve the core stat. So for example if you want to increase your Agility, but you spent 20 points of Agility Tonus in the last fight, your workout fills the tonus buffer first, then starts affecting actual Agility. It’s just a secondary layer of tedium imo. I mean I appreciate the concept, but having to refill the ♥ thing (even if it gets fast) after every single fight means I’m 100% obligated to hit the gym between doing pretty much anything since there are so many unexpected fights in the game — and when I hit the gym it leads to dealing with the game’s obsession with food and energy; two things that become a nightmare about 25% of the way into the game. No. They’re not hard to manage. They’re annoying to manage. Traveling to Abu’s Shop, the Farm, Gym/House, back room, every single time I get hungry; which is ALL OF THE TIME, is an exercise in patience and a ♥ time vampire. There’s nothing interesting or fun about it. You’ll have plenty of cash, 5 inventory spaces, and a stocked fridge at home. But nothing becomes automated (again, I beat the game). You still need to go to the gym or your house and walk through another door to eat out of a fridge. You still need to sleep or rest and you still need to worry about the introduction of eating having a decently large impact on the timer. It becomes a whole thing that’s just not fun.

I also spent about 25% (seriously) of the game staring at that ♥ map. Dragging my cursor — which on a controller makes it even slower — to the farm, clicking, loading, buying 5 slime sammies, then back to map, drag cursor back to gym, click, load in. 500 ♥ times I did this. Is that fun? Is this fun to people?

Point is I love Lazy Bear games, but apparently I love them on easy, and can barely tolerate them on normal. I don’t even want to know what hard looks like. Maybe your food drains while the game is paused? Maybe you start the game in a wheelchair and traveling from location to location takes 20 real time minutes? Or maybe you can introduce status ailments after training that requires a healer to take care of just kidding that’s a thing already.

But seriously, I completely understand that the studio made the game in their own vision with their own difficulty and that’s their call. It’s a me problem, is what I’m saying. And I know that. But I always play games on Normal or Hard the first play through and this is the only game/studio that makes games I can only handle playing on Easy. It’s weird. Also I beat Elden Ring and other Souls games, tons of management games, and roguelike/lites that were considered very difficult. I just don’t think PC1 or Punch Club 2: Fast Forward (now) is difficult. I think it’s annoying as ♥. I’d still give the game an 8/10 though, honestly. Even after all of that. Because again, it’s a me problem.

Easy mode does pretty much exactly what I want it to do; it slows down the tedious mechanics and let’s you focus on activities, story progression, and fun. It introduces convenience, and solves a problem Normal introduced which is very strange to me. It’s like Normal is hard, Easy is normal, and Easy doesn’t exist. Lazy Bear has a very (imo) unique approach and perspective when it comes to difficulty.

Either way, I wish I had started on easy. But if you’re just picking up the game, and tend to get annoyed by painfully tedious mechanics I’d hard recommend you alleviate some of that and roll with Easy. You probably won’t miss out on anything, other than punching your keyboard or slipping into a coma while you restock your fridge at Apu’s shop for the 250th time in the last hour.