C
		Title	Fur Fighters
		Publisher	Acclaim	Graphics	B
		Developer	Bizarre Creations	Sound	B-
		Released	September 2000	Gameplay	C
		Platform	Dreamcast	Longevity	C+
	ESRB Information
	Animated Violence, Comic Mischief, Suggestive Themes
	Highlights
	Searching for baby animals gets real old real fast and multiplayer is nothing to write home about.
	Full Review

Also available for the Playstation 2 and PC, Fur Fighters is a third person shooter that feels like Acclaims answer to Rare's Banjo Kazooie on the Nintendo 64...except, you recover baby animals rather than puzzle pieces and collect gold triangles rather than gold notes. But, Banjo did not carry shotguns and grenade launchers with him in Banjo-Kazooie, so at least Fur Fighters brings something new to the experience.

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I went through three different opinions of Fur Fighters while playing the game. The first of which was: what in the world is this? When the game starts, the Fur Fighters are going about their daily lives on their island in the middle of nowhere. The group is made up of a collection of different animals and their families, including a dog, cat, kangaroo, penguin, raccoon and dragon. The afternoon is interrupted as the children from each animal family are kidnapped by General Veggoh, who apparently is the offspring of a hammerhead shark and a bear (or something). He makes up some excuse for not killing the Fur Fighters then and there and never makes it clear why he is taking their children in the first place. As far as I can tell, Veggoh wanted to piss off the Fur Fighters so someone could have an excuse to make a game.

After playing through the tutorial and getting into the actual game, my opinion gradually shifted towards enjoying my play through. The graphics look good for a Dreamcast title, some of the geometry is a bit clunky and some textures are used a bit too often, but for a nine year old game, they hold up well enough that I did not find myself thinking about it very often. The sound and music is also about the same; I would have liked a few more music tracks to fill out some of the environments. But for the most part, the different areas of the game world have unique music and usually by the time you get tired of hearing one of the tracks looping for the 100th time, it is time to move on to the next area.

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Eventually though, I reached the point where I wanted to stop playing the game and play Banjo-Kazooie instead. As I moved further into the game, the number of enemies the game throws at you increases. This is a problem because the controls in the game are a pain to work with. Looking around with the joystick, pressing the buttons to move and strafe and using the triggers to jump and fire becomes difficult when trying to dispatch a room of 15 enemies who have you surounded. I found myself either moving too much and shooting too little or standing in one place trying to take out enemies. I also started to lose interest in the game as I reached the later levels, when retrieving the baby animals became a huge chore. For some unkown reason, in order to save one of the children, you have to rescue them while playing as their parent character. So, for instance; if you want to save a penguin baby, you have to go find the Fur Fighter of the same species and use them to save the baby. At one point, I got fed up with this convoluted puzzle and started using a FAQ. Collecting most of the babies boils down to the following; go get this Fur Fighter, then go flip this switch, then find another Fur Fighter to flip a different switch that only they can get to and then backtrack to find yet another Fur Fighter so you can at last save the baby sitting in the middle of nowhere.

Fur Fighters boils down to a Banjo-Kazooie adventure / scavenger hunt game with shotguns and grenade launchers. If that sounds like a winning combination to you then you may enjoy this game more than I did. But my official recommendation is to play Shenmue on your Dreamcast before resorting to Fur Fighters.