CLASSIC GAMING
Fur Fighters: Viggo's Revenge
Developer:  Bizarre Creations
Publisher:  Acclaim
Genre:  Third-person shoot-em-up
Year:  2000
System:  Dreamcast, PC, Playstation 2


Videogames, like any media that encourage fantasy and imagination (hopefully) have a grand collective of many varying races, each one with their own societies and cultures and beliefs.  Videogames at one end of the spectrum strive to be as radically different from reality as possible, ranging from the parallel to the otherworldly.
One game that drew its line with a parallel world of mayhem and violence brought forth a strange yet familiar world.

Story - Fur Fighters begins its tale in the small village they reside in, isolated from the world, lying at the coast, nothing but blue sky and ocean to see.  The inhabitants are Roofus the Glaswegian canine, leader of the titular group; Juliette the Parisian feline with cynicism as sharp as her claws; Rico the Argentinian penguin who's fave hobby is daydreaming; Bungalow the Australian kangaroo that is all brawn and little brain; Chang the firefox/red panda of Hong Kong with knowledge and honour honed together; and lastly Tweek the Welsh dragon who was just born from his dragon mother.


While the gang have been resting, their catty arch nemesis Viggo has come upon their village and incapacitates them with sleeping gas.  To make them suffer, he kidnaps their children and spouses (as well as Tweek's mother) to leave them alone and suffering in emotional anguish.  The gang however don't hang around as Roofus makes up a plan to head out to Viggo's locations and recover their families, with the aid of a few other allies as well, namely their physician Sergeant Sternhauser the German okapi and the spirit of General Bristol, their old walrus comrade.

Gameplay - The main objective of the game, is to head out to the individual worlds, each with their own levels, and recover the babies of the Fur Fighters by a mixture of good thorough exploration, combat skills and puzzle solving.  The levels are generally quite large and contain several inhabitants which may require help to allow you to reach the babies, as well as dealing with Viggo's minions.  One thing must be remembered in your rescue.  The babies will only be rescued by the parent they belong to, which is easy enough to guess and normally the puzzles involved will have to involve the use of that particular Fur Fighter.  Each Fur Fighter has a special ability.


Roofus can dig away to another area at special mounds of dirt, Juliette can climb any wall with scratch marks on them, Rico can swim underwater, Bungalow can jump twice as high as the others, Chang is small enough to get into small spaces and Tweek can glide.  You can only control one character at a time as the teleporter they utilise has been damaged and as such only allows one character out on the field at a time, which requires an interesting level of strategy into level layout and teleporting.
All the Fur Fighters have a health counter, which is fully healthy at 100.  It will go down if they are shot, burnt, fall from great height or physically attacked until it hits 0 and the fighter dies and you must retry again from the last teleporter point you touched.  One useful ability is that an injured Fur Fighter can be swapped for a healthy one at a teleporter and recuperate slowly as the other healthy character dishes out the damage.

Thankfully aid will come with tips from General Bristol's cryptic advice for the puzzles, and Sergeant Sternhauser's rigid insistence on physical fitness, which normally turns out into a memory game.
There are also health items throughout the levels in the form of Pet Yums.  A tin will recover 20 health, a can will recover 50, and a box will recover full health.  Other items in the game to watch out for are teleporter tokens, the teleporter's slime which leaked out and crystallised into golden tokens.  100 lie within each level and while it is not necessary to obtain all of them, you must obtain enough to restore enough power to the teleporter and allow you to access later areas of the game.
Another aspect of Fur Fighters is the combat.  Firstly you have a range of weapons, starting with only your physical attack and pistol, to use against enemies, later upgrading to other weapons later in the game as well as upgrading those weapons to more powerful/faster variants if you find the weapon upgrade itself.  Each weapon has also its own ammo.  Pistols use bullet clips while shotguns need shells, and so forth.


Graphics - Fur Fighters is shown entirely in colourful toon-style cel-shading, the characters all looking sharp yet unique and the backgrounds given charming detail (from humorous to pleasing).  The levels themselves offer a delightful range of imagination and exploration, nooks and crannies amuck and hidden on purpose to make sure you look everywhere.  Another wonderful aspect of the game is its violent quality.  While the game is violent, it is not so in the traditional sense.  Instead of shooting an enemy to have blood spurt out, you get...fluff.
Yes, fluff.  All the characters in the game have the same visceral qualities of stuffed toys.  Shoot them well and an enemy will bleed white fluff out of their body into a small crumb pile of it.  You can even blow off their heads and be rewarded with a fountain of it spurting from their neck.  It's violence in the Chuck Jones MK II format.  Other than that, the water effects are quite superb in the game, seeming very different from the cel shading in the sense that it is the only part of the game that's actually fully realistic.


Music/Sound - Another of Fur Fighters' charming qualities is its music.  All areas of the game have their own music, the levels within them retaining the same music as the area hub does.  But the real innovation of the music is that it is DIFFERENT for each Fur Fighter.  In the first hub the music rarely ever changes, but in later areas, the music becomes more rapidly different.  All the Fur Fighters have different musical styles playing.  Roofus has the backing of bagpipes and drums, Rico has the calypso, Chang has oriental themes, Bungalow has the more tribal Aboriginal style, Juliette has the classier Gay Paree tones and Tweek retains the essence of whimsical flutes and chanting choirs.  You'll rarely ever get tired of the music because of the many times you'll be swapping between characters that you'll not get that much of a chance to hear all of it.
Sound is relatively good in the game.  The weapons sound quite cool with shotgun blasts and cartoony thwacks, as well as general ambience of whatever world you are within, ranging from gentle birdsongs to drilling machinery which you will eventually drone out among the gunshots.
Voice acting was nonexistant in the Dreamcast version, each character speaking in weird-pitched gobbledegook to retain the toony feel of the game that little bit more.  But come the PS2 port, the characters now have full voices of not too brilliant accents but then this is a game that is anything but serious.


This game is the Looney Toons of the videogame world.  Slapstick, the slightest of topical jokes, unrealistically portrayed violence, stereotypical accents and bright colours.  All of these qualities lie within the Fur Fighters, an underrated game that while may never become as popular as Looney Toons, is still enjoyable for the same reasons.

Fun and Innovation - 4/5
Replayability - 3/5
Gameplay - 3/5
Presentation - 4/5