Video Game Review: Megabyte Punch

Megabyte Punch

Team Reptile

Beat Em Up

Nintendo Switch

I’ll start this off by admitting that I’ve never been a big fan of beat ‘em ups.  It’s not that I think they’re bad, I just was never very good at them.  That’s why it was very surprising that Megabyte Punch caught my attention the way it did.  Obviously the first thing to get my interest was the fact that you play as a funky little robot.  The more substantial points were the two-dimensional platforming and the customizability of your character’s moveset and skills.  I love customizing my characters in games, so this immediately had me sold.

The game took me a while to get into.  In the beginning, the controls felt confusing and the rules were not explained very clearly.  I also experienced several crashes that forced me to play through level 1 multiple times, although I was not able to replicate those crashes any time afterward.  After finally managing to get through level one, I realized the biggest thing that sold me on the game:  It played near identically to Super Smash Bros Brawl’s Subspace Emissary.  I always adored the SSE mode in Brawl and constantly lamented the lack of a similar mode in future games.  Playing through Megabyte Punch brought back good memories.  Much like in Super Smash Bros, your player character does not have a traditional health bar.  Instead, you have a damage meter that builds up as you take damage.  The higher your damage, the more you get knocked away by attacks.  If you get knocked into a wall hard enough, you lose a life.  The same goes for your enemies, so levels tend to have a lot of flying bots and level destruction.  The customizable abilities are very similar to the special moves in smash bros, activated by pressing the B button while pointing in specific directions.  Enemies have access to the same abilities as you, and oftentimes defeating them nets you the parts you need to gain those abilities.  At the end of every level, you fight a named boss on a platform with basic smash bros rules, where the objective is to knock the opponent into the “blast zones” at the edges of the stage.

Unfortunately, my praise for the game slows down from there.  While the core gameplay is incredibly fun and solid, the game itself tends to come off as repetitive and sometimes even monotonous.  The blocky design tends to make every level look like a recolor of the last.  The enemies are equally samey-looking for the most part, as they are mostly just robots like you, even using the same parts as you.  Even the level bosses tend to look similar, besides having some unique parts.  Even the music, while enjoyable, tends to get interrupted frequently by the music that starts every time you get ambushed- a situation very comparable to the werehog sections of Sonic Unleashed.

While the gameplay has a huge amount of potential, there are several things that harm the experience there too. The enemies can easily become frustrating, as they have a bad habit of spamming the same attacks over and over and locking you in a cycle of hurting.  This is especially painful with enemies armed with projectiles, as even without causing much knockback your damage meter can build up to dangerous levels quickly and the levels themselves do not offer many if any, ways to lower your damage meter.  The bosses are especially guilty of these methods, as they tend to have unique moves that they can easily spam to keep you from landing any hits.  Your abilities also tend to feel less useful than your basic punches and often are situational at best.  Hard-hitting moves are usually very difficult to land, while moves with better reach are more often than not extremely weak and have to be spammed to give good results.  Even with all these flaws, I still find myself coming back to the game just for the visceral fun of sending robots smashing into walls by the dozens.  I can only hope the developers will continue to learn from this game and improve in the future.