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Megabyte Punch: Combining Nintendo's history into a modern indie package

Alex Walker ABC Technology and Games 7 Nov 2013
megabyte punch

Old school made new school.


You can broadly separate indie games this year into two genres: those trying to deliver different, unusual experiences (the dystopian Papers, Please, macabre games like Depression Quest and Cart Life or co-op centric games like Monaco) and those weighing heavily on nostalgia (the rogue-like Rogue Legacy, or old-school RPGs like Shadowrun Returns). The latter applies to a lot of Kickstarter titles, especially the most successful ones: games like Star Citizen, Elite: Dangerous and Project Eternity are all trading on the popularity of genres that owned a greater share of the spotlight in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Megabyte Punch fits into the second category; while it's technically an action-platformer, the debut effort from Reptile Games is best described as a homage to Nintendo's beat-em-up classic Super Smash Bros. Inspiration has been taken from Mega Man and Mario, with a degree of exploration and a particular flavour of level design absent until developers decided they wanted to resurrect the spirit of yesteryear.

The core of Megabyte Punch revolves around combat. You play a "megac," or a robot, tasked with repelling two rival factions vying for control of the Heartcore, a sentient, AI-like being that powers your little town. As you travel throughout the levels, you'll fight off a variety of robots and collect a range of power-ups.

What underpins the game is a fighting system almost identical to Smash Bros. Your character has one attack button, one button for specials, a rechargeable shield and a move that can break opposing shields and launch enemies into the air. Beyond the basics, your megac can be equipped with a variety of attacks, including a projectile weapon, a teleport, a jetpack that doubles as an attack and an escape mechanism, a controllable whirlwind, and more.

There are 150 items in all, as well as a range of colours to jazz up your megac. The diversity is nice, although it's not as much fun as having a well-known roster of characters; beating up a featureless, nameless robot isn't quite the same as kicking Pikachu or Mario into the abyss. But the fluidity of the combat, mixed with the destructible environments and the vibrant retro-styled graphics makes it a pleasure all the same.

Most of your time will be spent in the campaign, which comes with six stages broken into three levels each and a boss battle at the end. You start out with three lives, but you'll have to restart the level if you lose them all before reaching the boss. (If you die mid-stage with lives in hand, you'll respawn at one of the many checkpoints, and if you reach the boss but lose the fight you'll have the option to skip the platforming sequences.)

At times the simplicity of the platforming can get a little mundane - you can skip over the majority of enemies, focusing only on the forced battles where the game locks you in an area until you defeat all the megacs nearby -- but it's balanced out by some interesting level design. Every level has a single exit point to the next stage, but there's usually two routes to reach that point. There's also a string of secret areas to discover. Some might be high in the sky, some hidden underground, and others accessible after a bit of remodelling to the environment.

The adventuring subtly teaches you to best handle your surroundings, a crucial lesson for the boss fights later on. Like Smash Bros, the boss stages hover over an abyss and feature multiple platforms at different heights. Using that space, as well as safely managing the distance between you, your opponent and the cliffs on either side, is critical to success. Adding the destructible terrain is a neat trick too; along with the customisable specials, it also allows you to create new angles of attack or defence, in a pinch.

It's an incredibly-dynamic fighter for something with a remarkably-basic control set, and while it undoubtedly won't find the level of success a Skullgirls or King of Fighters might, the fundamentals make for a strong core that many fighting fans can enjoy.

You don't have to play the adventure mode either: there are versus and tournament modes, with the latter pitting you against megacs in one-on-one matches that increase in difficulty the further you progress. Versus is the local multiplayer alternative version to the tournament mode, but there is no support for LAN or online play.

A nice twist is that you can use the game's level creator to make your own stages from a PNG file. The game reads each pixel and creates a single block to match, a very simple and cool way to facilitate user-generated content (although it also allows for some very unusual maps to be created, since you can convert any JPG into a PNG file and get it to work).

For US$15, Megabyte Punch is a fun, cheap alternative to PC gamers who have been relying on emulators or consoles for their Super Smash Bros fix. And while the campaign might get tiring for some, anyone who's played and enjoyed the recent LEGO series of platformers will find something to enjoy.

Megabyte Punch is available now for the Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms for US$15 through the Humble Bundle Store, Desura and Gamersgate. A deluxe version, containing high-def wallpapers, the 27-song soundtrack and additional custom maps is available for US$20.


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