FURI is an amazing boss rush game where you use a small but useful array of skills in order to defeat a varied array of bosses, each with their own gimmicks and patterns. The main drive of this game are the bosses themselves, with small tidbits of story being drip-fed between fights. I had a wonderful time with this game and I managed to beat most of it as intended - although I dropped the difficulty on the last boss after three hours of fighting seemed like too much. Also, the music is amazing, do I need to say more?
The game only has a few moves, so it's not too complicated to learn. You can shoot, dodge, slash and parry. You can charge your shots and your slashes, and that's pretty much it. The style of the combat system alternates between twin-stick shooting and straight-up fighting. I went through the whole game at the recommended difficulty and it wasn't -too- bad. The bosses I had more difficulty with took me about two hours, but I finally got through them. Like I said earlier, the only boss I cheesed was the last one, and the difference in difficulty was night and day. The way most bosses work is that you have multiple bars of health, and so do them. Whenever you knock them down, you recover a health bar, and if they knock you down, you restart at the current phase. This ingenious system gives some room for experimentation and error while feeling fair.
In the twin-stick segments, you can shoot and run around like you want and you usually have projectiles to deal with. Simple ones can be deflected or shot away, others have to be dodged and some special attacks can only be evaded by moving out of the way. I had some issues with the way the dodge worked, but I'm not sure if it's because I couldn't wrap my head around it, I felt like it wasn't super easy to dodge the way I wanted. After you knock one life bar of the boss, they go into 'close-range' mode, where you cannot shoot and have limited movement. Here it's more about dodging or parrying the bosses's attacks and hitting them when the occasion presents itself. If you manage to parry hits, you recover some health and parrying them perfectly gives a even greater boost. All bosses don't act exactly the same way, some of them don't have a twin-stick phase, others don't have a close-range phase and they all employ very different attacks.
Between boss fights, you just walk from point A to point B. The environments are gorgeous, but there's absolutely nothing to do besides slowly walking. This is a weird thing, it could've been a cutscene, or there could've been more to do. I'm not saying FURI 'needed' this, but maybe upgrades you could find between fights would've helped. It's not a big deal because it fits with the feel of the game, but I still feel like these segments are weird. The world of FURI is super interesting, with the locations and characters you encounter, and that's mainly why I tried to play on the normal difficulty; You can only fight the few last bosses if you do.
Ultimately, FURI is great. I love boss rushes and I love games where you can just retry quickly when something goes wrong. The snappyness of the action and the ease with which you can just retry when you die makes it less frustrating to learn patterns and moves. I managed to defeat some bosses on the first try, others took me plenty, but I got through it and would recommend it wholeheartedly.
