A game can be truly beautiful and also provide astounding gameplay. That’s what we at GameReviewsAU believe. And The Game Bakers have proven us very right with their latest action game, Furi. Filled with mystery, plenty of boss phases and requirements of swift reflexes, we’ve had our hands full just getting past the first couple of boss fights! Read more in our Furi review.
Platform Used For Furi Review: Gigabyte P35, Intel i7-4720HQ 2.60GHz, 16GB Ram, GeForce GT 965M
Developer: The Game Bakers
Genre: Action, Bullet-Hell
Recommended If You Liked: DoDonPachi, R-Type, Gradius
Price: $24.99USD
Rating: 
As you are beaten across the face by a being resembling the three-faced god Brahma, the god who created knowledge and the universe, your introduction to Furi leaves you feeling a sense of enfeeblement. Your captor says they will keep killing you again and again. But this perception of weakness is soon expunged when a weird rabbit masked character frees you. Informing you that killing the jailer is the key, you see the protagonist of the story is a straggly white haired, tanned, bad-ass looking guy. It’s apparent from this first revelation of who you’ll be controlling in Furi that weakness is not something you’ll be tainted with. Picking up a sword provided by the aforementioned rabbit mask, you set out to kill the jailer as you have been instructed.
Here is where you get to control the strange hero of this story. At the beginning of the game you are prompted that a gamepad is highly recommended to play this game with, but not being in possession of one, I used my keyboard and mouse. However when you are moving around the environment, I can see why a gamepad would provide a more sufficient way of controlling the white haired stranger.
Reminiscent of games like the first three installations of Resident Evil, camera angles change to provide a different view of your surroundings. But with the change in view, controlling your character can become a little confusing. At first you might be walking away from the screen whilst holding the up key, or ‘W’ on your keyboard. The next view might have you walking to the right of your screen which, if you let go of ‘W’, will require you to then hold down ‘D’ to move to the right. Other times you might still only need to be holding ‘W’. The angles can become a little confusing, but thankfully the times you’ll find yourself experiencing camera angle changes are mainly during exploration/story sections.
As you enter your first fight, the controls become very easy to get used to. Obviously you’ve gathered that the ‘WASD’ keys control your movement. But, if you’re playing with a keyboard/mouse, your mouse will control the direction in which you attack, dodge or shoot.
From the get-go, you are taught how to melee attack, shoot, dodge and parry attacks. These abilities stay with you from the “tutorial” battle, all the way to the end. 
There are no new skills to acquire, only your own skills as a gamer to perfect.
As well as learning the basics of fighting, this first battle will show you that each adversary has multiple phases. Knock their health down to empty and they will enter the next phase with a fully replenished health bar. If your health is fully depleted, you’ll fall to your feet and come back to life with a full health bar. But you can only do this a few times, and with each fall, the enemy you are up against renews their own health. Once all three of your “tries” or lives are used up, you have to start the boss battle again from the very beginning.
As you may have learnt from other games where bosses have multiple phases, each new phase is usually harder than the last. This is the same in Furi, and difficulty levels can often feel similar to hardcore games like Dark Souls. One boss fight could have you spending hours, if not days to perfect. And also similar to Dark Souls, Furi doesn’t pull any punches during the tutorial battle. You’ll be forced to learn how to dodge and parry successfully before even being allowed to progress.
Battles are undertaken in a large area that has you running around in a top-down kind of view. You’ll run around and dodge your enemy’s attacks whilst trying to get hits in yourself with either melee strikes or long range shots. Once your adversary has reached a certain point on their health bar, the battle gets brought up close. Here you can only use melee attacks as well as dodges and parries. Being caught in a tight circle that only allows you walk so far away from the enemy, you’ll need to keep an eye on them to mentally prepare yourself for what type of counterattack you should utilise. Are they about to fire some kind of projectile or area of effect attack? Dodge or interrupt their attack with a charged up melee attack of your own. Do you recognise that the enemy is about to launch a flurry of melee attacks? Get ready to initiate some well-timed parries that will heal you for a small amount if successful.
Furi is all about skill. Practice may not make perfect, but it will certainly help. Every boss is a mystery and you won’t know what their attacks are until your first meeting and experiencing them for yourself. Observation is key and learning a boss’ attack pattern will be the way forward.
Continue reading on the next page…
[schema type=”review” url=”http://store.steampowered.com/app/423230/” name=”Furi on Steam” description=”A game can be truly beautiful and also provide astounding gameplay. That’s what we at GameReviewsAU believe. And The Game Bakers have proved us very right with their latest action game, Furi. Filled with mystery, plenty of boss phases and requirements of swift reflexes, we’ve had our hands full just getting past the first couple of boss fights!” rev_name=”Furi Review” rev_body=”I feel Furi is aimed at older gamers who like a bit of nostalgia and appreciate darker, mysterious stories filled with exciting challenges. You’ll definitely enjoy playing through Furi if you can take the heat!” author=”GameReviews AU” pubdate=”2016-10-20″ user_review=”4″ min_review=”1″ max_review=”5″ ]