Developed by The Game Bakers, Furi is a hack and slash/shooter consisting of mainly boss fights. I’m not usually one for this type of game, but Furi captured my attention. Instead of playing through different missions in a campaign or wandering vast environments, Furi focuses on several boss battles where players continually hone their skills to advance.
The story of Furi may confuse people at first, and while it isn’t the main selling point, it offers a surprisingly intriguing narrative. The game starts off with your character held captive in a prison, with no knowledge as to why he is there. After being freed by a man wearing a rabbit disguise, whose simple advice is to “kill the jailer,” and “fight for your freedom,” your character goes on a journey to do just that. Along the way, you must fight several different bosses, each with unique abilities and designs. While traveling between each arena, the mysterious man guiding you provides some backstory for every upcoming boss. At the end of the game, once you escape, you realize why the mysterious man helped you, and you are given a choice that will drastically affect the world. For a game that primarily focuses on combat, there was a lot of thought put into its story.
The real hook of Furi is its gameplay. Bosses start out with a full health bar and several lives, giving multiple stages to each fight. Once that bar is depleted, they lose a life, and generally the bosses then evolve, for lack of a better word, and begin to use new and different weapons and abilities. Your character is first armed with a type of gun and a sword, and both are normally needed to defeat your opponents. What I love about Furi is that the bosses don’t feel like bullet sponges and your attacks aren’t futile. I needed to observe each boss and come up with appropriate strategies that would best suit that particular fight. Button mashing won’t help. This does mean that I died frequently, as it can be quite challenging, but it also means that with every death I got a better understanding of how to win. For those who think that the game is too difficult, there is an easy mode called Promenade. The only downside of using it is that achievements are disabled.
Its art style and soundtrack are also stand-out features. The graphics in Furi aren’t highly detailed but use vibrant colors to create something looking like a cartoon. The electric music fits the atmosphere of the game perfectly and adds another level of enjoyment to its combat.
I feel like more people would be able to enjoy it if it was a different genre, but that would fundamentally change what Furi is. Although I would have liked larger areas to explore and for there to be more to its gameplay than just fighting, Furi is also so good because it doesn’t try to be too much. It’s a contained experience without being boring. Still, I want to know more about the universe and its characters, and not expanding on its world seems like a missed opportunity.
Summary
Furi isn’t a game that will appeal to everyone based solely on its genre, but its strong and solid combat make it a wonderful game for those who do play it. It values skill over luck, and that is certainly apparent in every fight. The gameplay may prove to be a steep learning curve for some, but defeating each boss is incredibly rewarding. Combined with beautiful graphics and an upbeat soundtrack, I had a great time playing Furi even through its frustrations.
Jennifer is a games journalist, former games journalist and PR Manager at Gearbox. They contributed 234 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: went on to write for Windows Central and later managed PR for Gearbox Software.