Sometimes, genre standards exist for a very good reason. Paw Paw Paw is an adorable beat-em-up about an animal resistance fighting against a king insistent on getting everyone in his kingdom into pants, but it makes the mistake of forgetting to include invincibility frames, which means that you can be damaged by several enemies at the same time, dying instantly to endgame opponents whenever they attack at the same time. This isn’t just possible, but more likely than not to occur every time you play through late-game levels thanks to the introduction of opponents who resist stun when attacked, allowing them to kill you instantly in the middle of your attack. There’s no defense against this if you play as a melee character, nor is there any workaround you can use. Using mounts doesn’t work because enemies are perfectly capable of knocking you off and killing you before you complete Paw Paw Paw‘s comically long standing-up animation. Hiring CPU allies is a waste of money since they always die to the very first mob of late-game enemies. Paw Paw Paw is a game with oodles of promise but also enough mistakes that I couldn’t finish it. I got close, but no. Just no.

Paw Paw Paw‘s dialog could use some polish, but the story is charmingly lighthearted

Again, I haven’t finished the game because of its awful penchant for insta-killing you in a number of different ways (though I was only a few levels away from the end of the path on the overworld map, which means that I was likely 2-3 levels away from completing Paw Paw Paw), but it’s pretty obvious where things were headed. The story begins with a benevolent king whose sudden demand for his anthropomorphic citizens to wear pants coincides with the crash-landing of glowing pink space rock, shards of which are visibly protruding from his head, into the royal palace. Benevolent kings and their prosperous nations being used by villains is a gaming trope as old as time—the earliest example that comes to mind is Final Fantasy IV back in 1991, and I’m sure there are far older examples out there—but the ridiculousness of pants-based oppression gives Paw Paw Paw a leg up.

Obviously, the story here doesn’t take itself too seriously. Your character is chosen to rush ahead in the name of Antipants, the pants-denying resistance movement, mainly because they’re cannon fodder. The later discovery that your side has tanks and skywhales (along with the elaborate excuses for why they weren’t available at the beginning of the game) allows your character to occupy a kind of Bruce Willis-in-Die Hard mix of weariness and get-it-done that’s sort of charming.

But the English dialog is incredibly rough. Words are frequently missing articles, erroneously split up into multiple words, or just plain misspelled. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker given that stories in beat-em-ups have historically existed to provide a pretense for face-punching rather than trying to tell an actual story (with a handful of exceptions), but it nevertheless reflects the same lack of polish that ruins Paw Paw Paw‘s gameplay and serves as an early red flag. And while this dialog can be skipped, you’re forced to sit through 3-5 second (or longer!) animations that precede each skippable part of the conversation. This can add a significant wait to stages that begin with a cutscene. I can’t fathom why the developers would make cutscenes skippable while leaving intact the lengthy, unskippable animations that play between them.

There are ingredients here that could shine if the beat-em-up gameplay is ever fixed up

While your character’s personality remains the same regardless of which character you use, each character has a completely different play style. I started with a slow character who uses a two-handed weapon and leveled up a few times with them in the early levels. Then I reached an awful early stage that required attacking a cart over and over again to push it to the right side of the screen while being attacked by enemies and the cart’s one-hit kill bombs. I tried out an archer character but eventually settled on the “botanist” because of their quick movement and attack speed. Each character also has two unique special attacks. In my botanist’s case, one threw down traps to wrap up enemies temporarily while the other was a friendly area-heal that came in especially handy during a later mission where I had to escort a tank through several mobs of enemies.

Very few characters use the same weapons, so you’ll be acquiring weapons for the whole roster while playing, and these also come in different tiers and rarities. Equipping higher-tier weapons (which do much more damage in addition to having extra effects like setting enemies on fire) requires reaching certain nodes on each character’s level-up tree, though, so it’s possible to unlock something that you can’t use immediately. Equipment drops often enough to be exciting, and while it’s possible to find the same weapon multiple times, doing so will cause the duplicate to turn into food, Paw Paw Paw‘s currency.

There are multiple things you can buy using your food. HP-restoring items are always a safe bet, of course, but they won’t get you through the chaotic, unpredictable boss fights, only some of which are remotely fair thanks to bosses’ stun resistance and high damage. Like endgame enemies, bosses can kill you pretty much at will whenever you’re in their range by landing 2-3 blows before you’ve even hit the ground. This was a major headache early on, but what I discovered is that my botanist could attack much faster on a friendly mount, and you can purchase mounts from almost any base. Using health potions to survive levels and mounts to beat bosses evened the odds and worked for longer than you’d probably think.

But without invincibility frames, Paw Paw Paw‘s potential pros are driven into the ground

Your items are persistent, so if you use up all of your health potions in a stage, you either have to find or buy more of them to have for the next stage. That took a little getting used to, but it’s fine. Purchasing allies works similarly, as they’ll stick by your side until they die or you hire someone new, but repeating the same stage won’t resurrect an ally who died on your last attempt. Trying different combinations of mounts, CPU allies, and HP-restoring items can become incredibly expensive when a stage is insta-killing you so frequently that you aren’t earning back what you spend on it. Early on, this is mainly a problem because of traps, which can see your health halved because you grazed a switch you could barely see. Especially since traps tend to inflict status effects that deal even more damage after the fact. Even the ones that merely stun you do so for infuriatingly long.

Later on, the traps become less of an issue and you’re left to contend with enemies who can’t be stunned by attacking them. Being able to do so is crucial because you don’t receive invincibility frames when taking damage. Combine that with absurdly long ragdoll animations and unreasonably long standing-up animations and you have a recipe for taking anywhere from 3 to 10 hits any time an enemy attack knocks you down or back. Throughout much of Paw Paw Paw, you can mitigate this problem by bunching enemies together and attacking that entire group because most enemies are stunned when damaged.

But then enemies who resist stunning start showing up and you have no way of knowing how many hits you can land on them before they poke you with their weapon. It doesn’t help that their attacks can inflict stun on you, leaving you wide open. Mounts stop working as a strategy because enemies can kill the mount and finish you off before you hit the ground. Allies die against the first wave of enemies because they run into danger. Health potions are no use when you’re hit with 5 attacks at the same time and instantly die. The only strategy that works is to get lucky enough for the computer to forget to attack enough times for you to survive—to run at that brick wall of instant death and hope that the stars align on your 20th attempt. It’s not fun or rewarding in any way. More than anything, it feels like a combination of padding and poor game balance.

The only strategy that I can see working would be to use a ranged character, but every character levels up individually. That means that while my botanist is level 18, my two unlocked archers are level 1 and 3. It would take hours to grind their levels up, and since weapon tiers require leveling up 4-5 times to reach certain nodes that increase your proficiency by one (these allow you to equip weapons one tier higher, which is stupid since I found a lot of items that are either tier 1 or 3; no idea what happened to tier 2) I’d be doing so while inflicting early-game damage. You can’t use the powerful loot you’ve acquired for other characters throughout the game without first grinding their levels up. Forcing a player to spend several hours grinding to maybe overcome poorly designed mechanics is the kind of thing that fosters resentment. This is clearly a “you” issue, Paw Paw Paw.

The visuals are pretty good and look great at 4K, while the music is upbeat and repetitive

I can’t criticize much, if anything, about Paw Paw Paw‘s visual style. It can get a little busy and hard to read at times, but that’s true of most beat-em-ups. I appreciate how distinct all of the different areas are, with the caves and city areas being some of my favorites because of how colorful they are. And while some background elements and cutscene art appear to be upscaled when playing at 4K, all of the characters are nice and sharp. Paw Paw Paw‘s soundtrack isn’t quite as impressive. It’s upbeat and can occasionally be a little catchy, but it’s also highly repetitive and even sounds a little overcompressed at times, which causes the volume of some instruments to waver erratically (this is probably most apparent in the minigame stages). It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination. It just didn’t stand out enough to catch my attention, which was laser-focused on gameplay missteps.

Story: 2/3 Gameplay: 0/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ – 5/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Paw Paw Paw review. It took 7.7 hours to get close to the end and quit after repeatedly being stun-killed, insta-killed by 5 attacks at once, and other crap like that.

Paw Paw Paw review – Inadequate beat-em-up mechanics first appeared on Killa Penguin