When people think of terrible fighting games of the 16 bit era, their first thought is probably Shaq Fu, but I think that does a disservice the sheer volume of horrid fighters that came out in that era. One such disgrace of a game is Brutal: Paws of Fury. There is no redeeming quality to this trash. I've had the game since I was a kid and I've always hated it. Brutal is a prime example of why creators GameTek deserved to go bankrupt and have their properties locked away in Take 2's vaults, never to be seen again.
While I am no fan of furries, I can at least forgive the use here because this is from a time before it was a weird sexual fetish and anthropomorphic animals in cartoons and games were still normal. Still, the puns are unforgivable. The art style is boring and generic. The best animated things in the game are the silhouettes on the character select screen, which is just kind of sad. The stages look decent, but they overreached by putting stuff in front of the character sprites, which is just plain dumb in a fighting game.
As a fighting game it doesn't work. The controls are stiff, the animations are bad, and there is nothing fun about it. You have to unlock special moves by playing through the single player, which is a bad idea. It's an artificial way to extend the life of the game, but really it just makes it more annoying. The only difference between attacks of different strengths is the speed of the animation and the amount of damage it does. That is to say, a light punch is just a fast strong punch, and a strong kick is just a slow light kick. That's just lazy.
Fuck this game. I'd rather play Eternal Champions, but it's a toss up with Shaq Fu.
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