Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Review: Brutal: Paws of Fury

It was 1994, and the world was changing. We saw an end to Nirvana, and a start to Greenday. There was OJ and his Bronco, and the King of the theaters was a mighty animated Lion,






There was also a little known fighter game by the title of Brutal: Paws of Fury. The game was released to the Sega Genesis, and then soon after on the Super Nintendo system. It also saw ports to the Sega-CD as well as a semi sequel to Sega’s 32x. It featured a flurry of anthropomorphic animals from your mighty lion to your little rat, each with his or her own special abilities and traits. We have a lion that summons an amp and strums on a guitar on it to stun his foe, to large body but slow bear that has a belly dash attack.

We also have bunny, a cheetah, a coyote, and a vixen rounding out the crew.

The game featured your typical fighter plot; this grand martial arts tournament where fighters gathered to prove who the best is, stop me if you’ve heard this before. But no worries, even if you don’t get the plot, there is really no mention of it between fights to add to the game play.

And there is the biggest problem, the game play. The fighting consists of a light-medium-heavy punch kick system (for the SNES controller at least) The game it self is flawed. Balance between fighters is lacking with some characters being able to endlessly attack and dominate the fight, while others fall into the why bother category. All fighting games have this quality to a point, but it makes it so that even a small cast of characters feels even smaller. The difficulty scaling is terrible. Even on the lowest settings, after the third or forth fight, the game seems to become impossible.




The controls are jerky at best. Trying to pull off one of the quarter rotation attacks feels like a chance at best. Meanwhile, the computer, seems to be able to endlessly attack in a flurry of these, to the point where a corner combo can ruin you in seconds. Even simple fighting concepts such as blocking feel like a risk when you are under a barrage of attacks.

If anything, the game does have few high points in areas that are easily overlooked. The sound for it’s time, admittedly outdated, fits the mood and with a eastern feel to the game. It is simple, and doesn’t get on your nerves.




Artistically, the game is impressive for its time. Lush peaks and detailed beaches stretch wonderfully produced background, complete with lavish details that subtly add to the game. Waterfalls spring blue fluid down to a large lake green foliage grows in the foreground accurately obstruct the fighters from view. A dark storm over head darkens the fighter’s pallet, but they suddenly light up as lightning strikes in the distance. Even in current day fighting games rarely have backgrounds that look this good.

While static backgrounds are one thing, the animated characters themselves, have issues. Some hardly resemble the animal in which they represent, and some look like they were animated with a crayon. The rat, for example, looks like a reject from the blueman group. Heck take a look for your self.

Modern examples of furry art huh? Yeah right. Keep trying. Even as a ‘furry’ game, this hardly makes up for the lackluster combat and failure to match up to rival fighters of the day such as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. In the end, even if you can pick up this bargain basement title at your local EB for a few bucks, stay away. I can’t even recommend this game to the newest

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