Review: PANZER PALADIN is a Challenging 8-Bit Platformer for a Modern Era
Panzer Paladin is a game from Tribute Games for Nintendo Switch and PC that released recently. The team at Tribute Games was kind enough to send me a copy on the Switch and it’s been fun. In case you don’t know anything about the game, here’s a trailer.
When I started playing the game, I instantly got classic Mega Man vibes. The game is designed with 8-bit graphics as a platformer where you go around as a robot hitting things until you eventually get to a boss and defeat them. If you love classic Mega Man games from the NES days, I think you’ll really like Panzer Paladin.
There are moments where you must jump out of your mech and traverse the world as a vulnerable human. Typically, this is a fun little bit. However, if you’re a human because your mech ran out of health, it’s very stressful. As you might imagine, your human body has a lot less health than your mech counterpart and you don’t know when/if you’ll be able to jump inside again.
One of the cool things about the game is that as you defeat enemies, you may pick up a wide variety of weapons. While this is cool, what’s even cooler is that you can go to the Blacksmith mode of the game and design your own weapons that are then shared via the internet with other players with the chance to drop by certain enemies. I ended up getting a folding chair as a weapon once. That’s fantastic. Now, I’m not sure if that was one that Tribute Games came up with, but I’m willing to bet that it was just a weapon that another user made because of how random it is.
Of course, the game also offers a Remix mode once you beat the levels on Classic mode. The Remix mode serves up additional challenges for you. In addition, there’s a speedrun mode where you can even enable a ghost a try to finish the level as fast as possible.
Probably my biggest complaint about Panzer Paladin is the fact that you move really slow. I don’t like how slow you move. It drives me insane. My other complaint is that I constantly want to double-check controls and how things work like breaking weapons, but there’s no way to do that in-game. While not a deal breaker, it is a little annoying.
One thing I want to note is that like Mega Man, you unlock a weapon after defeating each boss. However, because of how the weapons system work in Panzer Paladin, it doesn’t appear that each weapon is super strong against a specific boss.
All-in-all, if you like classic challenging platformers like Mega Man, I think you’ll greatly enjoy Panzer Paladin. I wouldn’t say it’s as hard as Mega Man, but it does present a challenge.
