Feral Fury

A rogue-like twin stick shooter with a character that eats bamboo for breakfast, lunch and supper. Yeah, you don’t get to play with a panda every day so that’s pretty nice to begin with. Developer Skandivania Games made a pretty nice and cheap Xbox game that has a nice balance between replay value and microwaving your controller in rage, read more about it in this review.

THE GOOD

• Who said that being a panda was easy is terribly wrong. Feral Fury isn’t a walk in the park, you will die, die some more and die again. While not everyone is a fan from Rogue-like games (start over the game when you die) it perfectly fits Feral Fury. It is not so hard as other games in the genre, making it perfect for -normal- gamers too.
• The twin stick shooter gameplay is spot on, movement is fast and shooting your gun is accurate and satisfying. Moving room to room killing all enemies remains fun for a few hours, despite the sheer number of game over screens.
• Feral Fury really shines in the character design (that’s why it’s a shame to have a lack of enemy types) the playable panda soldier looks fantastic and the boss fights are fun and screen filling, a tad easy perhaps when you have a powerful weapon but hey.. all other parts from the game are hard enough.

MIXED FEELINGS

• It might be a compliment from the developer but they expect that players are really smart. Power ups and other pick-ups aren’t really described so you literally have to guess and pray that the thing will actually help you. In the beginning you have no clue what some thing do or how to use it.

THE BAD

• It is a nice feature that stages look a little different each time you die or play Feral Fury but it isn’t enough to keep that repetitive feeling away. Visually things never really spice up a little and the lack of more enemy types hurt the game in the short, and especially long run.
• For some reason daily run continues to freeze for me, whenever I play and reach a few stages I always get booted back to the Xbox dashboard. Searching a little on the internet revealed that I’m not the only one with this issue. Hopefully Skandivania Games can find the bug and release a patch so players can enjoy this fun leaderboard game mode. For now it is a shame though because the set-up from the daily run is more fun, I really liked the random items and negative curse that makes the game even harder. (Note, a patch will be released soon to fix this.)

Xbox One has a few twin stick shooters, Feral Fury falls somewhere in the top middle. For twin stick shooter fans Feral Fury will be what bamboo is for panda’s, a necessary thing.