Furi is a pretty neat twin stick shooter/arcade boss rush hybrid that combines bullet hell elements with timing and reaction-based melee for a pretty unforgiving, short, but thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Combat is fast, responsive (for the most part) and relitavely polished, and bosses will keep you on your toes with a variety of movies within different phases, and these phases are implemented really well. I'm not sure has ever done Boss phases quite like Furi, but it's pretty smart; a boss will have 4-5 different phases/forms, each one ending when the boss's health bar has been drained. When you die on a bossfight, the boss starts at the beginning of the last phase for a cost of one of your three 'lives'. Only when you lose all three lives does a bossfight start over properly from the beginning. You also gain a life (athough you cannot exceed 3) whenever you beat one phase of a boss.
This all comes together to give each encounter a nice ebb and flow, and allows you to organically get practise against parts of the encounter you're having more trouble with whilst not allowing the player to feel too secure after beating an easy phase; if they mess up the hard one too many times, it's back to the beginning.
The difficulty is there, refreshingly, but the frustration factor is curbed by the reliable controls and lack of any real 'bullshit' moments, plus the lack of loading screens between speedy restarts. Cutscenes inbetween phases of bosses/losing a life are just long enough to catch a quick breather and crack your mistreatred arthritic degenerate gaming knuckles without taking away from action. A quick few seconds to breathe.
The clever use of downtime cannot be said for the forced walking segments between bosses, however, which forces you to either hold your control stick in a certain direction for to watch a cartoon man walk across some admittedly nice scenery, or press X once to watch him do it on his own as a rabbit tries to sound profound near you. The story didn't exactly suck me in at all, and I gave it more than a fair chance to do so, if only to make the walking segments more bearable, but as it was I just pressed X to make the dude walk and did some tidying up towards the later stages. I can appreciate what they were going for, but you don't get points for effort, nor do I get less bored by appreciating it. What's more, the walking is even more painful when you consider that the camera changes from different fixed perspectives often, meaning that if you're manually walking for some reaosn the direction you're holding on the control stick won't correspond to the direction you're moving in the game and it all feels horrible. I think some downtime between bosses was necessary, but this isn't the way to do it.
Furi's hard mode is also a breath of fresh air in that it affects more than player/enemy health/damage; enemies are revitalised, using new moves and attacking in trickier patterns. They feel like they've been let of their leash, not just arbitrarily buffed, a feature that gels well with Furi's short, focused nature.
It's a high octane, slick and twitchy game that suffers during its downtime, but it's certainly worth a play.
Body
tips
Formatting [b]text[/b] - bold [i]text[/i] - italic [s]strikethrough[/s] - strikethrough [tt]text[/tt] - fixed-width type [color red]text[/color] - colored text (full list) [spoiler]text[/spoiler] - Text hidden with spoiler cover [https://www.example.com/page/,Link to another site] - Link to another site
Linking When you mention an album, artist, film, game, label, etc - it's recommended to link to the item the first time you mention it. Doing so will make it easier to search for your post and give it more visibility. To link an item, use the search box above, or find the shortcut that appears on the page that you want to link. You can customize the link name of shortcuts by using the format [Artist12345,Custom Name].
Formatting [b]text[/b] - bold [i]text[/i] - italic [s]strikethrough[/s] - strikethrough [tt]text[/tt] - fixed-width type [color red]text[/color] - colored text (full list) [spoiler]text[/spoiler] - Text hidden with spoiler cover [https://www.example.com/page/,Link to another site] - Link to another site
Linking When you mention an album, artist, film, game, label, etc - it's recommended to link to the item the first time you mention it. Doing so will make it easier to search for your post and give it more visibility. To link an item, use the search box above, or find the shortcut that appears on the page that you want to link. You can customize the link name of shortcuts by using the format [Artist12345,Custom Name].
possible the best implementation of harder/ng+ difficulty in any videogame ever. boss movesets on furier difficulty feel like whole new game and it isnt just "hey bosses now deal 2x damage, screw you". hard, but beautifully balanced.
The positives are quite obvious and plentiful but the downsides are also here in spades. Walking sections suck, even if there is an auto-walk option. Just make them cutscenes. And if they functionally are cutscenes, they’re not very good ones.
Also i personally have the gripe that different phases of each fight can just be wildly balanced in very odd ways; certain sections either being way too long and tedious or others being disproportionately more difficult than other sections. Feels like a very uneven experience a lot of the time, even if it does feel good to master.
Especially when a final phases is so much brutally harder. Makes the lead up to it feel super grating and tedious; work through these first 5 much easier phases just to get a chance at this WAY harder section again.
Also i personally have the gripe that different phases of each fight can just be wildly balanced in very odd ways; certain sections either being way too long and tedious or others being disproportionately more difficult than other sections. Feels like a very uneven experience a lot of the time, even if it does feel good to master.
Boss 4, namely