Fur Fighters

The Dreamcast is in no short supply of action shooters. With first-person shooters like Unreal Tournament and Quake III, third person shooters like MDK 2 and action games like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, there was little room for Fur Fighters near the end of the Dreamcast's life cycle. Yet the developers at Bizarre Creations managed to pump out a creative and yes, truly bizarre product. Afterall, it is not every day that you get to play as cartoon animals toting rocket launchers.

The storyline in Fur Fighters is involves the evil General Viggo, who is out to conquer the world and he has taken harmless little animals with him. The Fur Fighters are an elite group of commandos tasked with rescuing these furry little creatures and saving the world from the General. Each of the six Fur Fighters is tasked with using their unique abilities to defeat the bad guys, solve puzzles and rescue their family members.

You start your quest in The Village where you will learn the basics of gameplay. Aside from general controls (analog stick moves camera, face buttons movement), it also explains that you will need to exploit the special abilities of each of the Fur Fighters. To do this, you will need to switch between characters at special telepoints. Each telepoint only has one character though, so it is not like you can freely select any character at said telepoint.

The key to success in Fur Fighters is avoiding damage by strafing, understanding the special abilities of each character (some can glide, jump high, climb, etc.) and rescuing the little animals. The biggest mistake you can make is rushing through a level without finding the animals that need rescued. The way the game is set up, each world has three levels and a boss fight. The boss fight is locked though, and can only be unlocked with a certain number of rescued animals. If you skip by too many of them, you won't be able to continue the game.

The shooting in Fur Fighters is topnotch. This is aided of course by the clever controls that were forced upon the developer by the lack of a second analog stick. The good thing is that while the aiming can tend to be inaccurate, there is an auto-aim feature within a certain range of an enemy. The only real problems I encountered weren't with the controls at all, but with the camera angles. The camera tends to sit rather low and will often go into a first person view in tight areas. This makes platforming bits difficult at times.

What I would really like to highlight is the extent to which this game gives you a choice in weapon selection. Aside from your standard pistol and melee, you will eventually get your paws on a semi-automatic, shotgun, grenade launcher, rocket launcher, freeze gun, plasma blaster and a neutron gun. One could say that this was one of the first platforming shooters on the market. Clearly the PS2's Ratchet & Clank, one of my favorite franchises on the system, found inspiration in this game.

Clearly one of the best aspects of Fur Fighters is the graphics. This game could pass as a PS2 game and it was released in 2000. The characters, all of which look like furry little stuffed animals, are adorable. The bear army employed by the General is fierce and loyal, yet rather stupid. The levels themselves are well designed with a purpose in almost every room. If something doesn't make sense to you, just keep playing and you will find a use for it. Unfortunately, this means a lot of backtracking is required. On a positive note though, the levels are very large, colorful and there are a large variety.

When I first played this, I was surprised how much fun I had. The graphics are amazing for the time it was released and the gameplay will keep you busy. The humor and style reminds me a bit of Conker, yet the gameplay is more Ratchet & Clank on the Dreamcast. If the 20+ hour single-player isn't enough for you, there is also a four-player split-screen multi-player element as well. Fur Fighters is probably the best thing I have seen with an Acclaim label on it. If you find a copy, give it a try.