Some games make my heart overflow with joy. They remind me of leafing through small, beautiful magazines and teaming up with friends to take on tough bosses. Not everyone had an easy, simple or happy childhood, but we all have moments in our lives that we like to look back on, and games that briefly remind us of those moments. Panzer Paladin is for me one of themand the retro action platformer finally gets a second chance on PlayStation and Xbox.
It was developed by Tribute Games, the indie team behind 2022 GOTY contenders Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Revenge of the Shredder. Before that, they were best known for the puzzle RPG Wizorb and the run-and-gun side-scroller Mercenary Kings. All of the studio’s projects have shown top-notch pixel art and a flair for transforming the foundations of old genre classics into homages that look great and feel fresh. After 2017’s Flint hookinitially described as “Spider-Man with a gun”, released tributes Panzer Paladina 2D platform game where you control a mech and collect giant medieval weapons.
It is structured like Mega Man with a level selection screen and boss battles at the end of each level. It borrows from Blaster Master by leaving your mech to navigate parts of the levels as a small pilot with a grappling hook. It plays like Zelda: Breath of the WildNintendo’s unique side-scrolling experiment that threw Link into exciting 2D duels against armored knights. What Panzer Paladin has what those games don’t is an elaborate breakable weapon system that lets you collect swords, spears, axes, and other deadly tools as you play, and even craft your own and share them with other players online.
There are many spike pits, but no Castlevania-like recoil that slams you into them, and each level has optional checkpoints. The combat is crisp, the levels are inventive, and the art oozes love, respect, and appreciation for the 8-bit era. But the boss fights are tough, and there are definitely some platforming sections that will have you throwing the controller away. The warm, fuzzy feeling you get from the retro nostalgia doesn’t stop Panzer Paladin of being, all in all, a pretty harsh step backwards.
Its development also followed a trajectory that is unusual today. Announced in early 2019, Panzer Paladin was developed in just over a year and came out in the summer of 2020, months into an unprecedented pandemic that no one saw coming. It released exclusively on PC and Switch, with a free content update in the fall that added a leaderboard and challenge levels. At the time, Tribute said there were no plans to bring the game to PlayStation or Xbox, leaving retro enthusiasts on those platforms out of luck.
With Shredder’s Revenge finished and the DLC was released last year, the time has finally come to Panzer Paladin to other platforms. If porting were as simple as copying and pasting code, it might have happened much sooner, but Tribute works with a proprietary game engine and had to enlist outside programming help as well as go through a complicated platform certification process that included ensuring that server support for the game’s user-generated content – its player-created weapons – was not broken on PlayStation or Xbox.
“You go through certification and you get bug reports for some things and there’s always the temptation to say, ‘Oh, we could fix this a certain way or add a feature,'” Ray, a producer who coordinated the process, told me in a recent video interview. “But there’s also this little voice that says we need to keep it as simple as possible so we pass certification and there’s less risk of something breaking because we changed something else.”
With that complete, Tribute can now focus on its next project. Will it remain a one-game studio or is there room for another? Panzer Paladin-big experiment in the future? “Right now we have several projects in the pipeline, including some ports,” Publishing Manager Eric Lafontaine (several of the studio’s older games like Wizorb are not on modern consoles). He added that the team is currently growing, a reassuring sign at a time when many other indie studios are facing extinction.
In the meantime, Panzer Paladin is ripe for rediscovery like a long-lost NES cartridge spiced up with modern technology. There is no shortage of great-looking retro games on PC and console these days, but it only takes a few minutes with Panzer Paladin to see that it has a lot more to offer than just another incredibly GIF-able pixel art game. And one of the things I love most about it now is the way it has crept into my own nostalgia for the summer of its original release. 2020 was an absolute shit year in many ways. Play Panzer Paladin offered brief moments of retro tranquility that I still haven’t forgotten. And now it’s back with a platinum trophy on PS4.
