Originally released for smartphones, FurryFury: Smash & Roll is a top-down flicking bump brawler. It might sound a little strange, but the gameplay is rather creative and reminds me a lot of Squid’s Odyssey.
You know how in pool/billiards where you have to knock the cue ball into other balls and ricochet them into pockets? Well FurryFury is basically pool but instead of sinking balls into holes, you flick monsters of varying statistics, into one another, to cause damage until they run out of health and die. The top-down gameplay takes place in arenas of different sizes and shapes and sometimes they have hazards. Bump your opponent into a set of spikes to cause additional damage, for example. Strategy is involved so simply attacking with basic ram flicks might not be the best course of action. Instead, you might want to take a turn to shoot in the opposite direction to collect a health boost or power pick-up. You might even want to hide behind that wall for a turn. It sort of takes the simple strategy found in games like Angry Birds or Peggle but makes it its own.
The mobile environment has carried over to this Switch release as there are optional micro transactions but there are tons of customization options. Assigning a new smack-talk phrase, a victory pose, or the color of smoke that protrudes from your rolling monster does not modify gameplay in anyway but there is a lot of this kind of stuff here if you wanted to dig in.
There are also multiple gameplay types including 1v1, 2v2, 1vsAI, and even 2p co-op. Unfortunately, the meat of the game was design around multiplayer so solo players are rather limited when it comes to gameplay options. The single player campaign, although it has many stages, must be completed sequentially and features some wild difficulty curves. I couldn’t beat the first boss battle which is just a couple levels after the game begins and put a screeching halt on my fun and progression. Since this Switch version is limited to local play, but with online leaderboard support, single player downloaders will wish there was some more meat on that bone.
Even though there isn’t much to do from a single player perspective, FurryFury is still a fun and creative game. It is easy to see that the devs poured their hearts into this one just by admiring the amount of pointless unlockables, there are multiple seasons of content available, you can report bugs with an email directly from the main menu, and the high-quality opening animation rivals anything broadcasted on Saturday morning. It is ideally played with a local friend at your side, but this game has one of those gameplay concepts that is so simple, it is amazing so few games have copied this fantasy focused RPG billiards gameplay.
SCORE: 8/10
More Creative Than: Snooker
Also Play: Squid’s Odyssey (Wii U and 3DS)
Wait For It: a new Monkey Fight mode in a future Monkey Ball sequel
By: Zachary Gasiorowski, Editor in Chief myGamer.com
Twitter: @ZackGaz
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