Fur Fighters

"One of the best DC games ever...."

Fur Fighters is one of the most flawless game ever.
Fur Fighters is a 3rd-person shooter but with a slight difference:
Most shooters (third or first person) usuall follow a linear style of play based around getting from point A to point B and blasting the life out of many enemies in the process. Fur Fighters also follows that rule (sort of) but it also has many other things that make it much more interesting such as hub sections, lots of puzzle solving, adventure sequences, item locating and monsterous bosses.
This game is very large so I'll break the review down to several sections:

Characters 8/10:
There are six playable (and cuddly) characters for you to use: Roofus (a dog), Bungalow (a kangaroo), Julliet (a cat), Chang (chinese panda), Rico (penguin) and Tweek (dragon). Each character has a unique skill (high jump, climbing, swimming, gliding ect.) and a close range attack but more often than not they'll be toting heavy artillery to bash up some enemies. The character desing is very interesting and in my oppinion very well done.

Graphics 10/10:
This game is supposed to be a cartoon (no seriously it is), the characters and entire layout have been made to look like a proper 3D cartoon image. This is very well done and the unique style is very effective and I love it!

Story 10/10:
A simple story (I'll try not to spoil the good bits), the Fur Fighters locked the evil General Viggo a long time ago. But Viggo returned and is out to dominate the world, although his plan does not consist of killing the fur fighters he does how ever steal their families and use them to work for him, the 6 brave freedom fighters go off in search of their families, stop Viggo's plans and of course defeat Viggo himself.................

Controls 10/10:
The default controls (I think) are quite hard to handle however there are four control types and so one of them should suit most players. It has standard shooter controls using the trigger buttons to shoot and jump and the rest based on looking, strafing, aiming, and weapon selecting. The idea of having the A, B, X, Y buttons used for controlling you character doesn't suit everyone but it can be changed to the analogue stick and this can make things much easier.

Sound 8/10:
The sound is generally very good, you can hear the enemies grunting before seeing them and this allows you to get ready for combat. The backing music plays a big part in most of the levels as it creates an atmosphere suitable for the location. One down point for some people is that the characters speak a load of jibberish that cannot be understood and instead of listening to them you must read the text at the bottom of the screen which translates their speech. I don't mind this speech problem because it adds to the cartoon effect but I'll admit I was expecting proper speech from the characters when I first played the game.

Gameplay 9/10:
EXCELLENT! The gameplay is amazing, it is good because the game has so many things in it: hard shooting action, major gun variation, unique themes and locations, fun mini-games, strategy/puzzle solving, humorous parodies and funny cut scenes.

Camera 9/10:
One things that bothers some people is the fact that it is a 3rd person shooter and that aiming is quite hard and while the camera is generally good angle problems do occur, in other words some people want it to be a 1st person shooter. I protest against that, there is no such thing as a perfect game camera so on the whole it is very good, the characters have a limited auto-aim and keep their eyes on the enemy to prevent aiming problems, also the game involves a lot of jumping and timing, it would be almost impossible to judge things like that with 1st person camera control. Because it is a shooting game the camera is ALWAYS fixed behind the characters allowing full view of approaching targets and if enemies appear from behind then your character will look at them to alarm you. The game does include a cheat enabling 1st person mode so if that is what you want then you can have it (provided you unlock the cheat).

Multi-Player 7/10:
The multi-player is great fun with 3-4 players but suffers a bit with 2 players. Another problem is that each arena has set weapons and so you are very limited for weaponry in some levels, but others have good quantaties of weapons and first person is available all the time for multi-player as well has good ol' 3rd person. Another good things is that you can hide your health and ammo quantaties from others by having it on your VMU screen instead of the TV screen where everyone can see it.

Total score: definate 10!

A truly great game, it is almost flawless (in my oppinion) but it has the odd bad angle every now and then but otherwise a truly great game.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 10/25/01, Updated 10/25/01