Full Metal Furies (Nintendo Switch) Review

Rogue Legacy was a diamond in the rough, held back by amateurish pixel art and animation, as well as some unimaginative boss battles. It proved that Cellar Door Games was a very skilled indie developer that could make the most out of what little they had, and craft something that was very hard to put down. Like eating potato chips kind of addictive, the cycle and balance was sublime and could carry the game in spite of the lack of visual flourish. With Full Metal Furies, the team has expanded their art team and aim to tackle the couch co-op style beat 'em up with a little puzzler twist.

Full Metal Furies has the dubious honour of being both beautiful and an eye-sore at the same time. Individual assets are rendered deftly for the most part, yet the problem is that none of it is cohesive, since it's mixing various art styles and rendering techniques. The actual player-characters are done in the standard pixel art style that is expected from most indie game developers, expertly animated this time, unlike Rogue Legacy. Things get jarring when the sprite-based characters are clashed with the painterly backdrops that have a sterile Flash animation feel to them. Things get even worse when character portraits show up and how they're drawn in a generic puffy style that makes all four playable heroines look like the same character in different outfits.

These things work well enough on their own, but mixing them all together gives a sloppy impression that this title is a slapped together patch work of ideas where artists were not working together. This is a minor gripe in the grand scheme of things that most gamers won't notice... that is until it starts to affect the gameplay. The Furies are very small sprites. Too small at times since the camera tends to be further away in some instances where the girls feel more like ants. This issue gets more egregious as the screen gets full of foes and similar coloured projectiles that becomes a lot to process. Compounded with colour coded enemies that correspond to whoever the player picks for their two-girl squad, things can get a bit hectic trying to leverage health and cool-downs.

This is both where the fun begins and ends, since Full Metal Furies does have a fairly deep combat system, but also has extremely annoying baddies that can become invincible at will, just because the game feels that the player is too good using Alex the fighter. This happens when swapping out to the other character becomes necessary, as now Alex is not allowed to damage the mid-boss for some arbitrary reason to make the less fun characters useful. This is sloppy game design at its finest and it enters the "we had to give this character something to do" territory because nobody would ever use them.

It is a shame because the core combat is very responsive and varied when fighting lots of fodder at once. There is even a fair bit of challenge to landing some of the parries, and the way how certain special attacks are visualized with arcs and range cones adds an element of strategy to the frenetic action. The sound design has a nice punch to it that gives explosions a satisfying crunch, and punches even land with snappy pops to them; giving the feel of the action some grittiness to it. All of this is nicely complimented with some expansive RPG style character trees to expand their abilities which is nice to have in a game where hitting others is the bulk of the experience, and finding new ways to hurt them adds some excitement to replaying some earlier stages to get some pay-back.

At the same time it also mitigates a lot of the challenge there might have been since it is pretty easy to become overpowered, especially for anyone experienced with action games. The most extraneous element found in here is the inclusion of, what can be best described, as hidden message puzzles. Maybe these are some kind of bonus, or maybe they lead to something else, but playing this with friends and trying to figure these out really puts a wet towel on the action. In the heat of fighting an army, stopping other players to try to figure out some puzzle involving a coded message is such a drag. These utterly disrupt the flow of the game and nobody ever wants to take the time to solve them when going into a game that encourages the mind-set of beating up anything that moves.