The Impact Factor

Feel The Fury

Review

Furi, The Game Bakers (PS4)

Abstract: Furi is a neon-soaked, electronic flurry of blades and bullets. A unique visual, aural and gameplay package, Furi confidently establishes itself as something you’ve never quite played before. As a boss-focused action combat game, Furi succeeds in a number of ways. The hyper fast combat, replete with skill intensive dashing, parrying, and attacking mechanics, plays wonderfully. Furi demands a lot of players and brutally punishes mistakes. Unfortunately, not everything in this diverse package works well. Bullet hell sections suffer from unclear projectile and player hitboxes that frustrate to the point of feeling unfair. Painfully slow and barren walks between boss fights leave the player bored. Taken together, however, Furi’s successes outweigh its failures to create a game well-worth playing for action fans.

Released for free as part of PlayStation’s July PS+ line-up, Furi is a new game from The Game Bakers that has its toe dipped deeply into Blade Runner, Tron and shonen (boys) anime. Furi is a wild ride, a breathless series of fights that test the true mettle of the player. Prepare yourself – it’s about to get furious.

The game starts with a prisoner shackled in a cell as a masked jailer is torturing him. Your protagonist, The Stranger, is silent. He neither knows where he is or why he’s there. As the jailer leaves you are greeted by a mysterious companion, a rabbit mask toting specter known as The Voice. The Voice frees The Stranger and informs him of the brutal journey ahead. The Stranger must fight through the most intricate, and deadly, prison ever built as he makes his way to the planet floating below. This is no easy task, as terrifying characters guard each floor: the guardians of the prison and bosses he must vanquish. As you move from floor to floor, The Voice slowly sheds more light on his motivation, who The Stranger might be, and who are the people trying to stop you.

Admittedly, the story is quite light. Motivations and the truth of your situation are revealed quite slowly. Questions are answered with more questions and much is left up to the player to interpret. The narrative framework for the game at hand, however, works well. Games don’t often need much to propel players through a serious of huge boss fights, and the same is true for Furi. What works best about Furi’s story is its establishment of a wholly unique world. The game’s credits cite game designers like Hideo Kojima and Goichi Suda as inspiration for creating Furi. It’s abundantly clear throughout. Furi’s world is like no other I’ve seen in a video game. The mixture of space with samurai with cyberpunk is perfect. From start to finish I was engrossed in Furi’s world. I only wish there was more to explore.

 

The Voice, The Stranger, and one impossible goal.

As you might have guessed, Furi is all about its combat. Furi is a “boss rush” game, meaning that the large bulk of the gameplay is spent fighting Furi’s 10 bosses. You move from one boss to the next with very little in-between. Furi would suffer if its bosses were bland, repetitive, or uninteresting, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Each fight is different, testing the player in a variety of ways so they can prove their mastery of the game’s various systems. Each fight takes place in an arena, but no two arenas are alike. Bosses are visually striking and impressively memorable. You experience a fantastic sense of dread as you walk into the arena for a new boss. What new challenge are you about to face? Fights can take anywhere between 5 and 45 minutes, depending on player skill and the boss being fought. My completion time was about six and a half hours, though looking at leaderboards some have completed Furi in as little as 45 minutes. As I’ll explain in great detail, Furi is all about player skill.

Each boss fight is a unique combination of Furi’s three central mechanics: third person isometric arena fights, 3D fighting-game styled close combat, and bullet hell. Let’s talk about the first. The arena-based isometric fighting is superb. Bosses hurl attack after attack at the player: projectiles, area of effect moves, and close combat. Furi follows along with the recent trend we’ve seen in games like Hyper Light Drifter and Stories: The Path of Destinies in which movement speed and dodging are the key focus. The Stranger moves fast. Incredibly fast. Furi emphasizes use of your dash move, a quick teleport with invincibility that serves as both your primary way to avoid being damaged as well your method for getting close enough to the boss to attack. Like all combat mechanics in Furi, the skill ceiling for this dash move is quite high. The dash button can be held down. The longer it’s held down, the further your dash goes. Timing your dash and knowing how far to dash make all the difference. When dashing isn’t an option, you can parry. Parries only work on certain attacks, like projectiles and melee strikes (as indicated by a visual flash and a distinct sound) and need to be timed perfectly to prevent damage. A well-timed parry blocks the enemy’s attack and restores health to your character. A perfectly timed parry leaves the boss open for a huge counter-attack. Learning to use your parry is challenging but immensely rewarding (and essential for the game’s later bosses). Similar to the dash, it too has a high skill ceiling. Furi is all about mastery.

 

The Chain is the first stop in a long line of brutal bosses.

Attacking bosses is just as skill intensive. You typically have two options for dealing damage while in the isometric arena combat. You can fire a laser pistol with the right analog stick at the boss. For some bosses, this will chip away at their health bar. Others can block or ignore the pistol damage entirely. The bulk of your damage comes from sword attacks. After parrying or otherwise opening up a boss for attack, The Stranger can unleash a four-hit combo. Depending on your window of opportunity, sometimes you can get all four hits and sometimes just two or three. Much like dashing and parrying, Furi allows the player to perfectly titrate how they attack. The pistol can be charged by pressing another button, which unleashes a powerful knock down attack against the boss, but it can be incredibly hard to connect with the shot. You can also hold down the sword slash button, which similarly charges a difficult to connect but powerful knock down attack. Dealing damage is all about finding your enemies’ weak spots and exploiting them. Like many great combat focused games, Furi has a delicate but fantastic balance of risk with reward. Do you try for that extra damage knowing you could be punished? Or go the safe route but risk spending longer in the fight thereby increasing the odds you mess up a dodge and die? Furi is steeped in difficult split second decisions that test dexterity, reflexes, and pattern recognition. I loved it.

Dashes, parries, melee punishes. Combat in Furi is fast and fabulous. 

Typically, by the time you’ve dealt enough damage to the boss’ health bar (they have several) in the isometric arena, they’ll fall. This exposes them to a quick melee hit that cinematically shifts the combat into a 3D fighter styled brawl. Here, it’s no longer about enemy projectile attacks or area of effect moves: it’s all about melee combat. Trapped in a much smaller zone, you have fewer options to escape your enemy’s blows. Quick dodges and parries are critical. This zoomed-in fight is the perfect culmination of that boss phase, and the way the camera dramatically shifts makes the player feel so empowered. One of my favorite fights in the game, The Edge, is entirely fought in this 3D fighter style. It’s so cool. It takes the mechanics you use from the isometric viewpoint and reformat them in a new and compelling way. And typically, after you down a boss in this perspective they shift to their next phase, meaning a new health bar and new attack patterns. Like the isometric viewpoint, this fighting is again all about pattern recognition, risk and reward, and perfect execution.

 

The zoomed-in melee clashes never stop making your feel awesome.

Just in case it isn’t abundantly clear by this point in the review, Furi is not an easy game. Furi is brutal, punishing players for even the smallest of mistakes. Though the game (usually) communicates what the player needs to do to defeat the boss, actually doing so is another thing entirely. The player only has 3 health bars. Get K.O.’d three times and you lose – you need to restart the entire fight. Destroying one of a boss’ health bars restores one of your own, but this only goes so far when the boss’ last few phases can devastate the player. I consider myself fairly skilled at games with combat like Furi’s, and even I typically took 2-3 attempts to beat a boss. This can sometimes be an exercise in frustration. Going back to the very beginning of a 40 minute fight just because you died to attack patterns you had never seen before isn’t super fun. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that Furi offers very small windows for both dashing and parrying. Mess up your parry timing by even a quarter of a second and you could be looking at losing a third of your current health bar. With all that said, I enjoyed Furi’s difficulty as it relates to isometric and 3D fighter combat. I love tough games when they’re fair. Furi, for the most part, nails that fair toughness.

Unfortunately, not all mechanics achieve the same degree of success. Namely, the bullet hell segments. I’m someone who loves a good bullet hell. They aren’t great here. Bullet hell segments take place from the isometric viewpoint, which poses a serious perspective problem. It’s hard to know exactly where the projectiles are or where your character’s hitbox ends. There is a reason most (good) bullet hells are top down or 2D. Getting hit by a projectile you’ve anticipated and dodged feels awful. This problem could have been mitigated in a couple of ways, but the most obvious of which is it make projectile boundaries more clearly defined. Like with a bold, dark outline for instance. Instead, projectiles are bright amorphous blobs of energy with fuzzy boundaries. While some bosses have limited bullet hell sections, like The Chain or The Scale, others rely on this mechanic for their entirety. Because of it, The Line and The Burst fights become painful to complete. Even more egregiously, Furi’s final final-boss is entirely bullet hell making it the worst fight in the game.

The fourth or fifth time you get hit by a projectile you were SURE
you dodged can really suck the fun out of the fight.

The problems don’t end with bullet hell segments, however. Outside of fighting bosses there is nothing to do. Normally this wouldn’t be a huge issue. I am more than ok with a game focusing on what works – Furi didn’t need anything more than boss fights. The player, however, needs to walk from one fight to the next. I appreciate what The Game Bakers try to do with these sections. Slowly walking gives The Stranger that badass feel. It also gives The Voice time to build upon the narrative and show off the game’s unique world. But the walking is so slow. With nothing to do other than push the stick in the direction you want to go walking becomes painful. A walk from boss A to boss B can take upwards of 5+ minutes. Slowly moving your character through barren, linear pathways is not fun for 5+ minutes. It’s not fun for 2. To make matters worse, sometimes it isn’t exactly clear which way to walk. This can result in walking several slow minutes in the wrong direction, adding to your snail’s crawl to the next fight. The walking problems are compounded by Furi’s decision to use fixed cameras along your path. Transitioning between one angle and the next messes with your directional controls. Furi tries to keep it consistent, like if you were holding down on one screen and the next you’re moving up holding down will still move you in the same direction, but it gets messy. Each new screen I would stop my character and reset which way I was holding the control stick just so The Stranger wouldn’t awkwardly stutter or walk into invisible walls.

 

I have one fear: having to endure the next overlong walking sequence.

Slow walk and chaotic boss fight alike are accompanied by a stellar electronic soundtrack. Furi has one of the best soundtracks of the year. The game features the works of several artists, like Carpenter Brut and The Toxic Avenger, that synergize with each other to reinforce the mood set by the combat and visuals. The pulsing beats get you pumped up and ready to take on the world. When combined with the cool character designs, great cell shaded look and diverse visuals, Furi is a complete aesthetic package that bolsters the entire experience.

Furi is a game with high highs and some low lows, but one that I can’t help but be enamored by. I want to return to the sci-fi samurai 80’s neon world to inflict havoc on the game’s fantastic bosses. I also feel the urge to better myself, to achieve the elusive A and S Ranks on the fights, or even complete one without taking damage. Furi is, for better and worse, very much its own thing. Furi is one prison I wouldn’t mind being trapped in again.

Furi

3/5