Vengeance of Mr. Peppermint

Just to be clear, I don't dislike this game, but I don't think I could recommend it to a friend. It has a nice pixel art style, but that's about it. The gameplay feels clunky, with some enemies being useless while others can stunlock you with endless knife-throwing skills. With more polished combat, this could have been a great game.

담배 좀 작작펴라 이놈아.. 도트 그래픽은 나쁘지 않았으나 그냥 고어하기만 한 전투가 지루합니다.. 특히 전투 패턴이 똑같아서 재미가 없고 그냥 똑같은 콤보의 반복..

Finished the game, got all achievements despite not having fun - that's on me. This is a game centered around fighting and that part felt terrible. Sluggiish and slow, enenmies have unnecessarily high HP (especially the spear dudes). They jump out of frame, "camera" couldn't decide where it should be, input was off and so on. Fatalities were fun - at least for the first time. After that they became just annoying because they take so long, but are still the best / fastest way to take down most of the enemies. I don't know - was excited for the game and I'm happy for everyone who had fun with it. It's just not for me.

I'm a big fan of brawlers and while this one looks good and has some great pixel gore, everything about how it plays feels amateurish. * The controls are laggy and unresponsive and can't hold up against even the simple combo system present here. * You'll fight endless waves and the same handful of mobs over and over again, with the occasional boss who is exempt from all the limitations the game taught you up until that point. * Oftentimes, the number of enemies will be so large that you have to constantly dash until you can finally get them lined up so that you can maybe land a few hits without being interrupted. * You'll knock a group of enemies down and sometimes they'll stay down, but other times they'll get up after a long period, often just as another full wave walks in. * You can't run and walk and a snail's pace. This is supposed to emulate the pace of a Hong Kong action movie, but it just feels sloppy and that most of the time, you're willing battles through luck rather than skill. Indie brawlers are not in short supply now and you can do much better than this one.

Long, repetitive fights with countless same enemies,

8.5/10 This is a beat em up, most beat em ups are repetitive without progession or combos. I really don't understand why people are hitting this game so hard about that aspect. The story is good (albeit old boy-ish), it oozes with style, with fluid animation, no glitches, and it's fun to do different combos to fill up your Vengeance meter (which also restores your health). I highly recommend this for beat em up fans. Recommendations: I Am the Hero, Ninja warriors,

I really wanted to like this game. I'm a huge fan foreign martial arts/action thriller films like The Raid and Oldboy, the latter of which this game is clearly derivative of, as well as other Korean action thriller films, so I was super excited when I heard about this game. Unfortunately, it did not shape up to my expectations in the slightest. The combat is fun for maybe 15-30 minutes but after that you've seen all there is to see and the rest of the game is painfully samey. The boss fights are terrible. The controls are unresponsive at times. The story is nonsensical and goes in a direction that severely turned me off. The foundation of a GREAT homage to films like Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy is something I greatly value this game for, however, and while I think this game is not worth your time, I do hope the developers of this game can take what they did here and make something special in the future.

As a fan of Park Chan-wook's The Vengeance Trilogy, especially Oldboy, I was immediately drawn to this game upon discovering its existence. Unfortunately, it does not at all live up to my expectations. The gameplay is incredibly monotonous and the fighting never really evolves over the course of the 3-4 hour campaign. Same combos available from the start, so you use what works, and don't use anything else because there's no point, and no new moves unlocked either. I will say that the finishers are usually awesome and it's worth performing them on each enemy type to experience them. The art direction is also fantastic and the music is mostly favorable as well. However, the writing is nonsensical most of the time, which severely detracts from whatever the story was going on about - and it makes sense eventually at the end, but by that point, you probably just want the game to be over. This game had a lot of potential to be a killer beatemup, but it falls flat early on and never bounces back. I really wanted to like this game, but I can't in good faith recommend it. (For those interested, it runs okay-ish on Steam Deck, definitely has some jank though.)

Ah yes. An Estonian video game that's based on a Korean movie that's based on a Japanese manga. Funny. The title is an amalgamation of two Korean movie titles, Peppermint Candy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, all while the game is heavily inspired by Oldboy. It's like calling your John Wick game Diehard Taxi Driver, and I also find the Mr. Peppermint name more fitting to the My Little Pony adaptation, but I digress. With slow movement and delayed attacks combat feels very heavy, and despite the number of combos you can perform they don't feel any different in practice. You can utilize some background props like a chair, discarded bottles and a meat hook which all act as instant knockouts for bottom rank enemies. The most disappointing thing is a great lack of usable weapons, there are enemies who use weapons such as baseball bats and wooden katanas but you can only really use them as finishers when the wielders are stunned. The famous hammer exists but it's not fully integrated into combat with its own moveset and simply functions as a finisher tool like any other interactables, one or two hits and poof. It's gone. Bummer. Once in a while you'll get your chance to initiate the skill "intermission" which fills your health bar and makes the game pause while Mr. Peppermint is aura farming at the center of your screen. Then the game lists you options: 1) You get a hammer. 2) You scare some enemies and make them leave the scene. 3) You stun all the enemies. 4) To just... waste the opportunity and continue. There's no reason for anyone to pick any option other than 2, as options 1 and 3 are just 2 with an extra steps. Stats of the enemies are not thought out well, some have too much health(spear guards for example, have a boss tier health, and they appear as many as 4 in batches in later levels) while some have too less, and their attack damage numbers hardly make sense, a 0.5sec swing from a baseball bat hits almost as hard as the sledgehammer strikes with a 3 sec windup. I also experienced more than 5 softlocks caused by the aura farming animation mentioned above, forcing me to reload the previous checkpoints. At this point the only positive of this game is the quality of the art materials. The pixel art is consistent and clean, and animations are super fluid, but even in this they deserve some criticism. The supposed Korean texts in the textures are the worst example I've seen so far. If they went to write random words from stock reference photos then sure, why not, I don't expect them to actually study the Korean language, but the texts in this game are not Korean script, they for some reason decided to invent their own indechipherable Koreanlike glyphs for this. You want to pay homage to Korean flicks but are too lazy to type a few words into Google translate? This requires the least amount of effort, why? A hefty pricetag of $20 for a game full of flaws as this is a hard sell. Its playtime is also very short, only 2 hours long which puts this game's per hour value at $10. Even if you're looking for simple references and nods to the OG movie, you won't find anything more deeper than the initial premise of an insomniac Korean guy with a white suit beating people up because the story of this game is a rambling mess that has little to do with the Park's masterpiece. Don't buy this, it's a waste of money. Thumbs down.

Just play Street of Rage 4 instead, or Double Dragon 2, or even Kung Fu Master on NES if you wish to feel something when you hit an enemy, or control an avatar that's not slower than 90% of the enemies, or fight bosses that aren't boring AF...