Save The Furries Review

This game was reviewed on Nintendo Wii (WiiWare)

If you’ve taken some sort of Life Sciences class in school, then you’ve heard of that little thing called Natural Selection: the theory that the strong and smart will thrive over the weak and stupid.  Save the Furries goes against that grain as you must save these poor, dumb, cute, little creatures from certain doom as they aimlessly wander into various pitfalls (such as spiked walls, Furry-eating plants, and other creatures) and bring them back to their home planet.  While the game features a significant number of levels of increasing difficulty, for 1000 Wii points, it might leave the player wanting for more.

Save the Furries is a 2D Lemmings-style game.  You start off with a view of a solar system, where you’ll select from one of the worlds available to you to rescue these poor little Furries from.  From there, you’ll encounter a number of levels of increasing difficulty where you must manipulate objects in the environment like crates, slingshots, and buggies to  safely navigate  your wayward little Furries through the level (or at least get the minimum number through) to move to the next.  There are no time limits; however, you’ll find the game challenging enough on its own.

The game requires use of the Wiimote’s motion controls to move a cursor around the screen, while you use the trigger (B button) to grab different objects to build bridges or blockades to prevent the Furries from running or falling into pitfalls and traps, or, using slingshots to fire bombs into obstructions and enemies or to hurl your green little buddies across the screen to the finish line.  While the controls work fairly well, there are some frequent problems that can cause grief for gamers.

The mechanism of picking up and moving objects to create bridges is simple enough and works well for the most part; however, performing actions which require precision adjustment, like pulling back a sling that’s holding a bomb and trying to send the explosive through a narrow gap, is much  like performing brain surgery with a monkey wrench as the Wii’s motion sensing isn’t really that good at detecting very fine movements most of the time.

Furthermore, in many levels you need to use the Wiimote to scroll around the vast landscape which doesn’t work out the greatest; oftentimes you’ll wind up waggling the controller about furiously to try to get the game to cooperate and move in the direction that you desire.  This becomes more problematic if you zoom in to make it easier to see the Furries dancing around the screen, as you’ll have to scroll around more frequently.

When the controls work and the Furries move at an easily manageable pace, you can configure a course for a safe Furry trek through the wilderness with minimal casualties.  Some levels do require you to have some quick problem-solving skills though, and the challenges can sometimes be irritating if you run into the aforementioned controller problems.  Little gamers especially will be frustrated at these issues, which is a shame because this is likely a title that would draw them to the screen and want to play.

The artwork in Save the Furries is very colorful, with the Furries themselves being very reminiscent of Ubisoft’s Raving Rabbids, both in design and mannerisms; from the goofy grins, little beady eyes, and the sounds they make, it seems that a lot of the influence in the creation of these little creatures came from those crazy Rabbids that both kids and adults enjoy.  The different worlds you visit too are very vibrant and imaginative as they range from jungle-like green-brown environments with colorful vines and Furry-eating plants, to icy caverns with blue and purple hues that both young and old gamers would find pleasing on the eyes.

Unfortunately the same praise can’t be given to the game’s audio experience, which, while creative, is overly repetitive.  The Furries only make a limited number of sounds, and the same song is played for every single level of the game, which after a while makes you want to take a cheese grater to your cochlear nerve.  Fortunately, you can adjust the sound volume to get rid of the noise, but it would have been nice to have more than a single song for the entire game.

Save the Furries’ premise makes little sense as well, considering that the Furries are advanced enough creatures to be able to build spaceships and navigate them through a solar system to other planets, but don’t have the common sense to look where they’re walking.  While a game like this doesn’t exactly require a substantial plot to catch your interest, it would be good to have a plot that made sense if you’re going to have one at all.  While this isn’t really a game breaker, it does make you scratch your head from time to time – if you’re an adult.

The thing is, Save the Furries really is a fun game, and the mobile version for the iPhone is a real hoot.  But clunky controls that make the puzzles more difficult than they should be, and repetitive audio make it a real tough sell for your Wii Points.  Save the Furries receives a 3.75/5.0.