Panda marines that are out to shoot, kill and blowup everything on a planet they are invading to turn into a bamboo plantation. If that doesn’t interest you then I honestly don’t know what will. Feral Fury is a fast paced 2D roguelite top-down twin-stick shooter action game developed and published by Skandivania Games, a company from Norway that has a two person team both of whom worked on this game.
The game is your standard rouguelite game that features three modes to choose from, namely Easy, Normal and,Hard. Easy Mode is very easy and is not much of a challenge, if you do play on this difficult prepare to get mocked by the game with butterflies around your character and birthday parties at the end of each chapter. Normal is a huge step up from easy in terms of difficulty but is also the intended difficulty to play the game in. It’s quite tough, unforgiving and can take a long time to beat after which you unlock the Hard mode. Hard mode’s difficulty is a mystery to me since I could never actually complete Normal mode.
The game does help you out with stat boosts and upgrades which are very scarce but are a very welcomed bonus as they can really help give you that mental boost to push forward and reach chapters you weren’t able to before. Boss fights were quite rare in Easy mode while in Normal mode they were quite a disappointment. They tend to take up a lot of space on screen which makes it very easy to shoot and their move-set can be quite predictable which makes it very easy to dodge and kill them. It felt like it lacked intensity and the pressure of being a boss fight which was quite the let down.
At it’s core, Feral Fury is a very good game mechanically. The movement, shooting and overall gameplay experience was good and satisfying. I’d say it really succeeds in the gameplay aspect. The dodging element really helps you move around and actually dodge projectiles in the small cramped room that has been populated by enemies. While the game does have procedurally generated levels, the map and the traps are what change every run. Enemy variety is decent but I would’ve liked to see more variations and different types of enemies as they can get reptitive, especially at the earlier stages which takes the excitement out of starting new runs and can make it feel like a very mundane task.
The graphics are mediocre with good explosions and plenty of gore which really gives the game a gritty and dark vibe that it’s going for, besides what the Pandas might make you think. The animation is smooth and it was neat to see that there were proper reload animations and that they didn’t skimp out on it. There is variety between the design of the maps and levels. The lighting is also quite nice and gives a really atmospheric feel to the rooms that you’re battling for your life in. The game lacks iGPU support which sucks for people trying to play this game on laptops. A lot of roguelite games are played on low end laptops without integrated GPUs and a game like this should’ve really supported iGPUs to reach a broader audience.
The sound is nothing spectacular and can be annoying at times with music that is good but can be very repetitive and, with sound effects being particularly louder than the other sounds playing at that moment, like when the noise of bullets is all you hear over the music and other sound effects.
Feral Fury is a good rougelite game that checks off all the boxes it is aiming for. With good controls and mechanics to go with a fun fast paced experience, it is a must try for fans of the Roguelite genre, while I feel that more casual gamers should stay away and come back after they are more familiar with the genre.
Feral Fury is out now for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC for $7.
