Feral Fury review
:: PANDA-MONIUMPrice: $3.99
Version: 1.0.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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Feral Fury is a game that seems built to ensure you don't succeed. It's a dual-stick, roguelike shooter that demands quick reflexes and disciplined movements from players as soon as it starts, and hardly lets up through its 13 stages. It's not for everyone, but Feral Fury is a great time for anyone dedicated enough to stick with it.
Bear necessities
In Feral Fury, you play as a gun-toting panda that is sent to a planet to kill as many bugs and hogs as possible. You do this by using the left side of the screen to move, the right side to aim/shoot, tapping to roll, and swiping to either change guns or reload.
It's a simple control scheme, but given the pace of the game, you may have some difficulties dealing with the relative lack of precision that comes with touch controls. Luckily, there is MFi controller support in the game, which is far and away the ideal way to play Feral Fury.
Claw your way forward
As with many roguelikes, Feral Fury resets your progress when you die, which will inevitably happen a lot. The game is totally unforgiving in its difficulty to the point that finishing just the first stage takes quite a bit of practice.
To help make you feel like you're making progress, blue orbs can be collected and banked between runs, which can then be spent on upgrades, some of which are permanent and can grant perks like increased movement speed, more ammo, and more. None of these upgrades ease things so far as to make Feral Fury a cakewalk, though. You'll still need to rely on your reflexes and everything you learn between runs in order to make it far in the game.
Bearly explained
As you learn to survive and progress through Feral Fury's procedurally-generated stages, you'll come across all sorts of items, enemies, power ups, and rooms that are hardly explained by the game at all. The sense of discovery and experimentation that comes along with this lack of information are part of what make the game both so difficult and so replayable.
Occasionally, Feral Fury's generated levels feel a little too easy or too hard, which can make some runs feel less fair than others. If you want to get a better sense of your skills though, Feral Fury provides a Daily Challenge where players get one chance per day to compete with other players to set the high score on a locked set of stages.
The bottom line
Feral Fury is one of the hardest games I've played this year, and I loved every punishing second of it. I wouldn't say it's perfect, especially if you don't have a controller to help you perform more reliably, but it's still bloody good fun.