At dinner, some people don’t want to eat their entre, they just want to skip to dessert. And it’s the same with gaming; some people don’t want to have to fight their way through tons of grunts just to get to the boss battle. It’s for those people that The Game Bakers are making the upcoming third-person action game Furi (PlayStation 4, PC). Earlier this week, I had a chance to see the game in action, and to ask Emeric Thoa (the game’s creative director, producer, and game designer) and Audrey Leprince (its executive producer and writer) about how the game is played, what story it’s going to tell, and how they got Takashi Okazaki — who wrote and drew the original Afro Samuraimanga and worked on both animes and the first, but not the second, Afro Samuraigame — to design the Furi‘s unique-looking characters.
While much was made about this game’s length, or lack there of, the real issue was how it wasted that time with dated mechanics and way too many cutscenes. But my biggest problem with The Order: 1886 was that it took a cool idea — a Gears Of War-style shooter set in a proto-steampunk London — and squandered it.
What should’ve been a fun and frantic arcadey, top-down, sci-fi shooter was instead a frustrating slog thanks to a lot of little problems that included, but were not limited to, pointless mechanics (I mean, seriously, what kind of a trained soldier doesn’t know to reload their weapon), bad graphical choices, and a wildly inconsistent difficulty.
Caught somewhere between low-budget and low-rent, this game is not only overly simplistic and repetitive, but it also has counter-intuitive movement that makes this more frustrating than fun.
This game isn’t so much bad as it is a waste of your money. I would’ve loved a new version of this classic 1996 game with upgraded graphics and better controls. I can even understand why someone would want a faithful recreation of the original game with the original controls and the original graphics. But what we got instead was the 2002 remake of the game that Capcom put out on the GameCube, but with that game’s awkward controls and the original graphics in HD. And why would I want that? Oh, right, I don’t.
While it would be easy to condemn this game for being overtly sexual but not all that sexy, it actually has bigger problems than just being potentially offensive. It’s terribly redundant, which makes it rather tiresome after a while, and I say that as someone who really likes hack & slash games you can just button mash to victory.
As someone who liked, but still saw the flaws in, the original Afro Samuraigame, I was encouraged when the people behind this sequel said they weren’t happy with the original either, and we’re striving to make something better. Which makes it even more sad that they failed. Miserably. Not only was it a bad game, but it was so flawed and buggy that the publisher gave everyone refunds and cancelled the other two volumes.
A few weeks before it came out, the executive producer of Afro Samurai 2 Revenge Of KumaVolume 1 (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC) — one of a bunch people at Redacted Studios who also worked on the original Afro Samurai — confessed that, “No one on the team was really happy with how the first game turned out.” Unfortunately, I doubt anyone is going to be happy with how this new game turned out, either.
