Pato Box

A great stylized game with a fun and ridiculous plot. You get to be a buff boxing duck who destroys things, what more do you need to know? I definitely recommend this game, especially if you're a fan of the kind of weird.

A lovely game. There’s a ton of charm and I still can’t get over how well the developers used this monochrome aesthetic. The comic book style and the kickass soundtrack are icing on the cake.

Pato Box takes the Punch-Out!! fighting style and gives it a Madworld aesthetic, resulting in an unexpectedly wonderful combination. The 3D sections aren't the most exciting, but the boss fights more than make up for that. Pato Box offers an intense challenge that will put your gaming skills to the test, but also potentially frustrate you at the same time.

Pato Box is definitely a game worth checking out. If not because Nintendo haven’t provided the world with a new Punch-Out!! game in nine years, then definitely because it’s a weirdly beautiful game starring a boxer with a duck head, who has been wronged by a large corporation and seeks revenge against a bevy of interesting and unique characters.

Pato Box is far from being a perfect experience and it is clear that it lacks polish in some areas. Fortunately, Bromio did a lot of things right so Pato Box stands as a fun and enjoyable twist to the Punch-Out!! formula.

A Punch-Out!!-esque boxing arcade with a strange yet entertaining Story Mode and a quirky cast of characters.

Pato Box not only succeeds in recreating the Punch-Out!! boxing experience; but it also pushes the formula further with a very good adventure mode, a great graphic style and a group of strange, unique characters.

A great visual style makes Pato Box stand out from the crowd, as does the duck/boxer protagonist. If you’re up for a challenge, with a game that requires you to master the rhythm of each boss fight, then Pato Box will be a champion for you.

Pato Box stands out for several reasons, and there is clear inspiration from certain successful games and films. Developer Bromio does an admirable job at implementing these cohesively, but it’s unfortunate that difficulty is a flaw overshadowing this black & white revenge tale.

I may have started this review stating that Pato Box is a straight up Punch-Out!! clone, and at its core it certainly is. However, while the abstract world where a fighting Duck seeks answers is a setup that just doesn’t make sense, it happens to mould nicely with its presentation. It’s far from a perfect game, and the filler sections in between predictably never live up to the actual fights themselves. Yet, in spite of all this, Mexican developer Bromio has managed to make decent use out of the Punch-Out!! formula to craft something unique enough to separate itself from other clones that came before it.

While its adventure mode-style exploration could do with a little more meat on its bones, we all know why we’re here - the Punch-Out!!-style bosses. The exploration sections fail to do the eye-catching visual style (and the story) much justice, but those brilliant big bads more than make up for it. Sprinkle in an '80s-style synth soundtrack that wouldn’t feel out of place in Hotline Miami and you’ve got a rough-yet-ready new contender on the Switch eShop.

Pato Box has a neat idea: take your boxer out of the ring and into the corporate world. It tells a story fittingly silly for a boxer with a duck’s head. However, the lack of checkpointing and overly long exploration segments are a one-two punch of frustration. Some floors of Deathflock HQ seem impenetrable and while the boss fights are the star of the show, even they aren’t without problems. The concept isn’t beyond saving, and it’s still possible to have a good time, but too often Pato Box just left me incredibly frustrated.