Weekend Warrior – Pangea Software - 1996 - First time playing?: Yes!

Pangea, what the hell is this.

I'm going to be up front here. I thought Weekend Warrior was bloody terrible, like bordering on Big Rigs levels of ineptitude. Okay, that's an exaggeration, it's still technically a functional game you can win or lose, yet it demonstrates such complete disregard for the most basic level of polish expected from all retail games with some ridiculous game breaking glitches leaving you questioning how no one picked up on them during the testing phase. However, given that it came out in 1996 when everyone was still learning how to make 3D polygonal games it's a lot more forgivable for it to be rough around the edges. It's easy to think "well Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider were out by 1996 so there's no excuse!" But trend setting games like those will only have their impact on the game industry after enough time has passed for people to draw inspiration from them. It took until two years after Mario 64 before we started seeing more 3D platformers in that style like Banjo Kazooie or Spyro or Ape Escape.

So with that in mind, as Pangea's first fully 3D game, I want to be more forgiving to Weekend Warrior, but WOW, is this game rough. Bad controls, awful combat, shallow gameplay, unforgiving and cheap in so many ways and just, so many glitches. This is a game where I ended up accidentally noclipping through a wall in every second level in the game, there's just large chunks of wall that don't have collision detection. Often you can even go completely outside the level entirely and just wander the empty void that lies outside. That wouldn't be so bad if the glitches didn't also result in frequent softlock unwinnable scenarios. That, or the game will just crash instead. It did that a lot for me.

I actually nearly didn't review this game because I couldn't beat it, which I felt would impact my ability to properly give it a full review. After a two day long break however I came back to it and finally pulled through. This game is surprisingly hard and I won't lie when I say it's what downgrades this game from "so bad it's good nonsense" to "actually agonising to play". A lot of this game simply doesn't play fair, which is something I generally hesitate to say since it makes me feel like I don't properly understand how the game in question works, a bad sign for a review. If you're a Weekend Warrior fan (I know you're out there, nearly every comment I could find about this game online was positive) and there's finer details on how to play this game that flew over my head, please message or email me to share! Even though I had a miserable time with the game I'm still genuinely interested to hear what people who enjoy this game have to say about it. Honestly, the game is so weird that I want to hear what anyone has to say about it.

I've gotten ahead of myself here though, I haven't even explained what the game is about. Weekend Warrior is about an American Gladiators style game show in which you pick one of eight characters to attempt to win big money with, but honestly some of these levels may as well be from Banjo Kazooie for how little they look like any kind of game show, especially when they introduce the sentient hopping carrots with googly eyes. The game show theme is somewhat prevalent throughout the game like the skybox showing the rafters of the studio room and the constant narration from the announcer, but the theme is primarily used just as a thematic element to link all eight completely otherwise thematically unrelated levels together. Why does this game go from a clown dimension to an old western town to a haunted mansion to a space station? The easy explanation is just "Weekend Warrior is a very weird show."

In terms of playable characters, it’s a lineup as bizarre as the rest of the game. We’ve got a cowboy, a punk rocker, a bag lady, a butcher, an astronaut, a sports fan, a postman and um, a racial stereotype. All eight of these characters appear as common enemies in gameplay regardless of which character you play as, including clones of yourself, so you’ll get to see a lot of the entire cast even in a single playthrough. Although it’s not reflected in-game, each character actually has their own unique stats, the stats in question being speed, attack power and stamina. I chose to play as Hull the punk rocker for my playthrough.

This was an immense mistake. More on that later.

The objective varies between each level, ranging from collecting items, just getting to the goal or defeating a boss, but the gameplay is the same across all levels. Explore the level and fight or run away from enemies along the way. It's kind of a beat-em-up I guess? The core gameplay is pummelling people with your "swing thing", a blunt weapon unique to each character that they beat their opponents with, but even that feels inaccurate since you never have to fight anyone except for the two bosses and can just run past the rest of the enemies. No, there's a better genre that fits Weekend Warrior; survival horror. This game seriously feels like playing Alone in the Dark 1 but only using your fists. You have sluggish tank controls, there's item and resource management, combat is clumsy and unsatisfying and straight up discouraged, the save system is restrictive and if you die you're sent back to the title screen. It's a survival horror game in terms of mechanics, but instead of being scary the tone is more akin to a weak episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

On those controls, yeah it's tank controls, only allowing you to move forwards and backwards while pressing left and right instead rotates your character. I'm not actually that opposed to tank controls in general. I love Tomb Raider a lot and honestly find Croc: Legend of the Gobbos to control very well. Heck, Pangea themselves actually did tank controls better with their next game after this, Nanosaur. In the case of Weekend Warrior though, it's the wrong kind of controls for the wrong kind of game. I sincerely doubt that the game was meant to play like a survival horror, this feels like it was meant to be a wacky action game. Action games using this control scheme like the previously mentioned Tomb Raider and Croc give you side jumps for greater manoeuvrability to prevent them having that Alone in the Dark feel, but there's nothing in Weekend Warrior to help you along those lines. The controls are sluggish, you turn far too slowly and even simple tasks like picking up items are a pain, thanks to small item hitboxes and having to press a button to slowly bend over and reach for the item, which you'll go through even if you're not lined up perfectly and miss the item completely, all the while this pick up animation leaves you wide open to attacks.

As for the combat, you have three buttons mapped to three different attacks, labelled "swing up", "swing down" and "swing low". To clear up the confusion I had at first trying to understand the difference between down and low, swing down has you swing your arm in a diagonal downwards kind of arc, while swing low has you crouch down to do a leg sweep. The attack animations for certain playable characters also really do not convey this well, they're very floppy and flailing and difficult to read as a result. For instance, Hull's swing up attack looks more like a kick to me, which led me to believe that it was likely a low attack since you can't get much lower than your feet. But no, you're not meant to pay attention to the massive exaggerated kicking motion she does, but instead the way she awkwardly swings her guitar back which honestly looks like she's just moving it out of her way. Not that it actually matters much in the end, enemies can't block your attacks or dodge or anything like that which would necessitate using different height attacks, nor can you dodge with your sluggish tank controls, so just hit your opponent repeatedly by mashing the button for whatever your quickest attack is and hope you can stagger them so they don't get a chance in to fight back. Some enemies are short and might only be able to be hit by a low attack, but that's as complex as it ever gets. Given that the only gameplay there is other than the combat is limited to walking around large mazes and picking up and putting down different key items, that's not a great foundation.

The difficulty curve can be very all over the place due to the game taking a Mega Man style approach to level selection, where you choose what order you play the game’s eight levels in. Unlike Mega Man however, there’s no final level unlocked after completing those eight levels, Weekend Warrior just stops after you’ve cleared the eight levels you started with, meaning that any level can be either the first level or the last level.

The levels vary in length and complexity. Half of them have a time limit of eight minutes, the timed levels typically being much shorter. The topiary maze for instance can be done in under three minutes, only requiring you to find three items in a small garden area and place them in a pot. Similar to the topiary maze is the wild west level, again a case of just getting three items and dropping them in a specific spot, but with slightly more aggressive enemies and an absurd bug where if you go up the stairs into the second floor in one of the houses, you can get stuck up there and unable to go back down the stairs, your character model being too tall to go back down without bumping their head on the ceiling. Yes, just going up a staircase can be enough to softlock yourself in Weekend Warrior. Figures that this had to be one of the few rooms in the entire level where you can’t walk through a wall to escape.

The Pagoda is a little larger but also very simple and goes by quickly if you choose to ignore the enemies and just run for it, having you ring three gongs hidden in the level. As it's a larger level there's a lot of open space which makes circling around enemies no hassle at all. The funhouse is probably the hardest of the lot since it's far more of a maze than the topiary maze ended up being, but it's also something of a highlight of the game simply because of the surreal atmosphere. It's still not very good to actually play but it's at least a visual treat and stands out as the weirdest level in a very weird game. Let me make it clear, Weekend Warrior being weird is a positive to me, I love weird stuff, it's just hellish to actually play.

The larger levels without time limits are generally much more tedious and frustrating. The haunted mansion is a large elaborate key hunt that is a pain to play legit, but it's also janky as hell and you can just completely avoid all of the key puzzles by walking through walls like they're nothing and making a direct route straight for the boss. Might end up being mandatory if you're unlucky too, I commonly ran into a glitch where I'd get the key and then when I try to unlock a door with it it would just vanish from the game entirely without the door actually unlocking, forcing a restart to get the key again unless you cheese the level. There's also a temple level that involves a lot of key puzzles and carrying items back and forward (of which you can only carry one at a time) but thankfully I never ran into the glitch here. It's also a much more straightforward level, though it's a slog to get through since it's super long and has a lot of extremely similar looking rooms padding things out. The second hardest level in the game award goes to the space station. This requires you to activate a self-destruct sequence by pulling four switches and then escaping on a shuttle. There's more key puzzles and I ran into the glitch in this level too, but the level itself is also a pain since it's large and maze-like with every room and hallway looking near identical. The self-destruct sequence also activates a 2 minute time limit which is very strict if you're still struggling with navigation or don't even know where the shuttle is.

Nothing however, compares to the utter pain and misery that is the uranium mines. This level is massive, it's the longest in the game. The objective is to pick up the uranium sticks at the start of the level and carry them all the way to the bottom of the mine where you drop them in a container. All of the worst aspects of Weekend Warrior's gameplay and design are on display here. Confusing maze like level design? Check. Cramped hallways filled with enemies? Check. Repetitive and drawn out? Check. And for the cherry on top, holding onto the uranium gradually lowers your health because it's radioactive, requiring you to take damage, in a level where health pickups are very far and few between, none can be wasted and you'll need to remember exactly where all of them are in case you need to backtrack to heal. You could try to run past enemies, but there's so many of them and if you slip up you'll be cornered with no escape which is game over, even at max health you won't be able to fight your way out, not helped by the fact that one of the common enemies is Hull who has a very high speed stat. So it's safer to just fight the enemies one by one right? Well, the postman player character is one of the most common enemies and he is absurdly OP, his mail bag has huge range and high damage and just a single postman is enough to get you stunlocked and go from full health to critical in seconds. Every time you fight another player character in this game it's a total coin toss as to who will win, sometimes the enemy repeatedly gets staggered and falls over allowing you to easily take them out without any damage, other times they won't even flinch at any of your attacks and will knock you down repeatedly. Whether or not you or your opponent gets staggered from an attack, as far as I can tell, is completely random, which in addition to the lack of any dodging or blocking makes combat completely luck based. This level is 20 minutes long if you play it the slow way of fighting everything one by one, and losing all of that in a second due to a single enemy stunlocking you? Yeah, that was enough to wear me down. Three solid hours of repeated attempts and I gave up, right at the end of the game, unable to pass that final hurdle. I swore I'd never touch this game again, I had nothing to prove trying to beat a game that was miserable to play, that isn't fun to play even when it isn't brutally hard.

Three days later I played it again. I am both weak willed and also a stubborn bitch who refused to be beaten.

Reading the digital manual again (which by the way, even the Weekend Warrior manual at one point crashed my entire computer when I tried to open it) I paid closer attention to the stats of the characters to see if maybe another character could give me an easier time. This time I chose the butcher, Delicatessen Dan, who is slow but has the strongest attack power of any character, effectively the opposite of Hull and the only character with stronger damage output than the postman. It took three more tries but finally, I beat the uranium mines by switching to a stronger character. Then, of course, I also had to replay through the rest of the entire game all over again to get the ending as the only way to play as another character is to start a new game. The ending is terrible, but after all of that frustration, the wave of satisfaction and relief I felt was incomparable.

Weekend Warrior is a bad game. It's entirely possible that there's something I'm missing about the combat that makes it more skill based, but even if that was the case, the game is glitchy and barely functional and a tedious slog to play, not helped by the messy difficulty and the unforgiving nature of it, only giving you a single life with no continues and only letting you save after you finish a level, meaning one death has you starting the level all over again. I had a lot of frustrations as a result of that and they definitely coloured my opinion on the game to be especially sour due to salt, but even with a much gentler playthrough after that with Delicatessen Dan, it didn't save the game for me. Honestly the game is so broken in places that I often can't tell how much is intentional design and how much of it is glitches. The walls you can walk through for instance, are those meant to be intentional secrets? There's a couple of instances of items in the funhouse which can only be accessed by walking through walls which must of been intentional, but in the wild west and space station levels you don't get anything for doing it, while the haunted mansion level lets you clip out of the level entirely, wandering the empty void outside the mansion with nothing to do. But how did entire walls end up like this? Like, it's common in 3D games for walls to be clipped through if you hit them at a certain angle with enough speed, but here you can just walk through the entire wall from any angle at any speed and go straight through it like it isn't there. I have no idea, Weekend Warrior is a bizarre anomaly of a game.

Funnily it seems that Pangea aren't too fond of it either, the history page on their official website even stating it wasn't their finest game, while even back in the early 2000s the download page said to not send them bug reports because the game is so old that it's incredible that it runs at all. But hey, it was a learning experience for them, and they put out far more impressive and polished 3D games immediately after this. If you're a fan of Pangea's later games like I am, Weekend Warrior is at least worth a look to see where they started, it's a fascinating little piece of Pangea history if nothing else and you can see a lot of graphical effects and UI design that were later implemented in Nanosaur too. I don't regret playing it, nor do I regret putting the effort in to beat it. It's terrible though. Not recommended. It doesn't even have any ports so you likely wouldn't be able to play it anyway short of buying an old Mac yourself.

- Page written by MSX_POCKY, 8th April 2023