Fur Squadron Review

Fur Squadron tells the story of ferret Blaze Mustela, sarcastic ace pilot Kiro Nax and engineer Axel Mex as they form a team of the game’s namesake in their mission to end the evil Skal Empire along with their units of cronies.

Fur Squadron is an on rails arcade space shooter which bears some ressemblance to Nintendo’s classic Star Fox on the Super NES/Super Famicom. While on-rails, you can move left, right, up and down in order to dodge enemies, their projectiles and any life threathing obstacles. To ensure your survival, players have a decent sized health bar.

As you destroy enemies, you’ll find yourself picking up power ups such as Shield (refills your health), lazer and missiles. In order to defend yourself, you have a basic attack and power up, homing attack. The puzzling thing here is that both default attacks are delegated to the same button; it all depends if you press or hold the button. You can also do a barrel roll in order to dodge enemy projectiles as it provided (very) temporary invincibility.

One of the game’s strong points is definitely the boss battles. They are quite challenging, and overall fair fights. The weak points are easy to spot and sometimes the game will thrown a wrench in your plans by adding a layer of challenge. For example, one of the early bosses, when it’s health bar is almost depleted, the screen turns upside down inverting the controls. Or it’ll throw invincible sub-bosses that will attack you from their position between you and the big baddy.

One thing is for sure, the visual are quite beautiful. The game has a synthwave 80s inspired visual theme and it’s something that’s severely lacking nowadays. While most levels are quite similar, being able to enjoy this visual style once in a while is a nice change of pace. The soundtrack on the other hand is a miss as it doesn’t really match the game’s gameplay nor the visual aesthetic. And the characters do have some voiceovers… but again, it’s made up jibberish crap. Just make the characters mute and let me read the subtitles. These jibberish languages are a pet peeve of mine; so annoying.

One of the game’s nuisance is the fact that when you die, you’re back at the start of the level. So if you blow up at the boss, you’re booted back at the beginning. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this as it’s common gameplay mechanic, especially in older games, it’s the fact that some of the levels are incredibly boring. So having to re-do them 2-3 times because you died at the boss is literally a fun killer. And also. There’s so many buttons on today’s controllers… why use ONLY ONE??!!

Fur Squadron is the closest we’ll get (as of this writing) to a (spiritual) successor to Star Fox. It’s a fun, challenging; albeit a bit frustrating experience. The bosses are pretty fun and challenging; levels are fun to blasts through (at first) and the unique aesthetic makes it stand out. Fur Squadron is a nice challenging diversion from the AAA titles but not without its flaws. Worth it especially thanks to its low price.