Penny-Punching Princess

Penny-Punching Princess’ simplicity is its strongest factor, but its lack of polish in narrative, and the price make it hard to recommend to every Switch owner.

Crazy, frenetic, fun: with this action RPG you cannot really go wrong. Fans of the genre will find their teeth, with a bizarre story, a level of challenge that's never banal and excellent possibilities for customization of skills.

Long after money has exchanged hands, Penny-Punching Princess will be remembered for the pun-packed, zany adventure that it casts you out on. The game’s inherently repetitive nature will mean it’s best chipped away at over time, but, while some imbalance with the difficulty can irritate, bribing everything in sight with the magical calculator allows it to leave a lasting impression than others on the portable home console.

I wish the difficulty spikes weren’t as annoying because this is a fun experience with some good humour and an interesting gameplay mechanic.

It’s gorgeous with a killer soundtrack and impressive sound design as a whole. If you want something that blends overhead action RPG gaming with a faster-paced dungeon crawler motif, give Penny-Punching Princess a go.

NIS delivers the weird yet again with Penny-Punching Princess, a fun little arcade romp that just escapes the danger of staleness. Stretched a little too thin but a lot of people are going to be enjoying this one with a price drop.

This is a pretty interesting concept, with good ideas and the originality you expect from NIS, although it gets a little bit repetitive.

Penny-Punching Princess might have its issues, but it’s a nice lightweight brawler that mixes together quick levels and a focus on grinding for items to make for a good home and portable experience on Switch, even if sometimes that expedient pace can be thwarted by some choke points. The issues might drag it down overall, but enough clever ideas make this a game worth checking out, as long as you’re not that much in debt to the Dragoloans.

You’ll find many hours’ worth of content available here, and learning how to best use your magic calculator abilities for maximum success is highly enjoyable. In the end we felt a little let down by the need to repeat earlier sections to unlock essential equipment, and the time wasted thanks to having to redo entire levels that were too difficult in our current state, but we’d still recommend giving this one a go if the core idea intrigues you enough.

Basically Penny Punching Princess is yet another low budget production by Nippon Ichi who tries to throw into the fray some new gameplay, without having to take too much work from the technical point of view. The combat system can also be innovative and interesting to deepen, but in the long run can not entertain the player who is forced to move for dungeons always the same, which must be repeated several times each to improve the statistics of the princess and mitigate a particularly high level of difficulty.

Penny-Punching Princess brings an interesting slant to the brawler genre, one that sadly can become fiddly and repetitive over time. As a fairly expensive eShop title (physical release plans were scrapped at the last minute), it’s difficult to recommend a purchase here, given what you could get for your money instead. Penny-Punching Princess is certainly not a bad game, but it’s not a great one either. One to look for in the sales then, where your calculator allows.

Penny-Punching Princess doesn't set its sights particularly high, and while it feels like it's achieving what it intended, it's hard not to wish there was a little more to it.

Truly, Penny-Punching Princess feels more like an indie experiment than a full-fledged game and that’s totally fine. It’s fun at it’s core and the feeling of repetition can be kept at bay by playing in small bursts, making it perfect for its target consoles – the Switch and the Vita. With that said, I simply can’t recommend this title at the current price of almost a full triple-A game. I mean, there are a bunch of incredible games on the e-shop that aren’t even half the price.

Penny-Punching Princess is a classic example of a game that has a bright idea but implements it in such a ham-fisted way that it becomes an annoyance.

Penny-Punching Princess at the end is more like a dungeon crawler than a pure RPG. Who will be captured by the original gameplay of the calculator will have fun for 20-25 hours without overly perceiving the repetitiveness, but without the right incentive other players may get tired earlier.

I soured quickly on Penny-Punching Princess. I love the art. I love the combat. I found the sharp challenge and simple, clean mechanics to all be very enjoyable. But I just couldn’t get past how shallow it really was in the end, and how the game failed to live up to the tantalising promises made in its lede. It could have easily been a 5/5 game, but instead it’s one of the real disappointments in 2018.

Penny-Punching Princess is a promising arena beat 'em up with RPG elements and an innovative bribing system. However, its repetitive gameplay and steep difficulty make it an exercise in tedium. Here's hoping for a sequel that remedies its unfortunate shortcomings.

If the price drops to around the $20 mark, this title would be a quirky gem. As it stands, the cost of entry and the lack of true depth to Penny-Punching Princess make it a hard game to recommend to anyone. As it stands, it’s just not a very good time to be had. The price, combined with the repetitive nature and lack of level design make it a resounding “meh” of a game. It feels like it was meant for the 3DS, and was quickly ported to the Switch to cash in, and that’s not a good thing.

Penny-Punching Princess is a much-too-redundant beat'em all to be worth the full price asked. Despite its good idea (on paper) to add a calculator which allows you too buy basically everything on screen, NIS game fells short on new stuff too encourage the player to defeat the same basic monsters into uninspired labyrinths.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with its focus on button-mashing action; in fact, the addition of the calculator to bribe enemies into joining you is a welcome idea that has merit. But each time the game hits its stride and lets the player feel a sense of fun, it’s quickly dashed by repetitive gameplay, dull story, or another crushing difficulty spike.