WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Brutal: Paws of Fury

Publisher: GameTek Developer: Eurocom Released: 1994

In the early nineties everyone was making fighting games. The ridiculous success of Street Fighter II spawned a tidal wave of me-too fighters, most of them absolutely atrocious. And how could Brutal: Paws of Fury be anything but? A fighting game starring anthropomorphic animals published by GameTek? Yikes.

How could you feel like a badass while in control of characters like Kung Fu Bunny and Foxy Roxy?

But you know, it really wasn't all that bad as far as console-only fighters went. And outside of the standard fighting, developer Eurocom tried a lot of really interesting – if not entirely successful – things to tinker with a genre that was fast-becoming stale.

For one thing, in story mode, there was actually a sense of character progression. When you started out, your character only had a standard punch/kick move set (three of each, naturally). As you won fights, your character would gradually learn all of the their special moves, ultimately meeting the final battle with a full arsenal.

It made the early fights a bit boring, but at least the game was trying something a bit different.

Brutal also offered full replays of each round, as long as you watched them immediately after the round had finished. Other interesting bits included a sound test complete with an on-screen band made up of game characters (this may be a European thing, Core Design pulled the exact same schtick with Chuck Rock), and a “blooper” reel that showcased things like early design tests and character sketches.

In a lot of ways, Eurocom was ahead of its time regarding the extra features they packed into the game.

And that sort of forward-thinking seems to have served the company well – it's been going strong for 22 years now as an independent developer. Pretty impressive in almost any industry, but especially this one.

Brutal wasn't without its warts, of course. While the animation on the characters was pretty nice, everything moved at a pretty slow pace. Not least the intro movies that seemed to tax the Sega CD hardware to its breaking point. And if you didn't have one of the superb Genesis 6-button controllers to play with, you were stuck using the start button to toggle the face buttons between punch and kick commands (this was pretty standard for 6-button fighters on the system).

But still, the game is a lot more impressive than I remembered it. It's nice to be so pleasantly surprised as I work my way through this bit of the Sega CD catalogue. I haven't had a chance to talk up many games lately.