Lucha Fury is an action-packed side scrolling beat-em-up, in which you take the role of one of four Mexican Luchadores. From what I gathered in the nonsensical opening cut scene, the story is that the four want to… there’s some new mas…. they want to advertise a dri… nope, I have absolutely no idea. If you want to see if you can decipher it’s meaning, watch the opening trailer (at about 2:10)
As a beat-em-up, you’d expect this game to have a solid combat system in place, after all, it is the main aspect of the game. However, Lucha Fury’s combat system is an absolute failure. Combat pretty much consists of the player tapping X over, and over, and over. Rarely do you need to change your buttons, and even if you try, it usually just results in the same ‘combo’ again. Occasionally bigger enemies will come along, and it’s easier to tackle them with a grapple, you’re probably thinking “Oooh, I get to use a different buttonâ€, wrong. Well, you’re partially right, you tap B to grab the enemy, then, you guessed it, tap X again, and again, and again, to repeatedly punch them at a pace slower than a dying turtle.
Choosing your character helps this in no way at all, why would you expect that!? Everyone has the same moves, with a small change in animation, so they’re all pretty much a simple re-skin of each other.
There’s supposedly a combo system in place, allowing you to perform new ‘techniques’ as you unlock them from levelling up. Regardless of its deceiving words, these add nothing to combos, unless you want to count adding a kick to your grapple so you can mash X or Y now! A lot of these techniques just add a single new move, like pouncing on a stunned enemy. Again, these add nothing to the combat, and they’re all pretty useless, I barely ever found myself straying from bashing X, it’s the most powerful, and effective move in the game, everything else is rendered useless and unnecessary.
Positioning in Lucha Fury is also a massive problem. If you’re not directly online with the enemy you want to grab or attack, you simply won’t. This results in very infuriating moments, being hit, and often knocked down all because you were a few pixels away from the front of the enemy. That’s another thing too; don’t get knocked down. If a standard enemy hits you, you’ll take a bit of damage, but if a large, or special enemy hits you, you’ll get knocked right to the floor. This triggers a stun on you, forcing you to wiggle the right stick for a few seconds. Sounds fair enough, yes, but not when it happens with nearly every hit you take, and then to add insult to injury, the enemy will come and hover over you, notoriously waiting for you to recover, only to knock you right back down again, and repeat the entire process.
Now, onto the enemies. As you play through this ‘masterpiece’ you’ll encounter about 3 different enemies, excluding bosses. You have your typical Goon, who will run at you, miss his hits, and just stand there doing nothing at all whilst you unleash your X button on him. You’ll see about 3 different re-skins of this guy, all do the exact same thing, acting no different. A few of them however will throw bombs, or fail at shooting you, still not offering a challenge. The second enemy you’ll see is the heavy guy, as described above, he’ll just repeatedly knock you down, and down, and down. Now, there’s no re-skins of this guy, unless you want to count one of the characters, who is the exact same model. So expect to be seeing the same grey tank-topped bulky guy over and over. The third is this weird dinosaur in an egg thing, which makes no sense at all. Possibly the most annoying enemy on the game, it jumps around, making it even harder to hind, then jumps at your face, triggering another pointless, time wasting wiggle-stick moment. Again, no re-skins for this guy, so you’re stuck with him the whole way.
None of the enemies offer a real challenge, aside from occasionally jumping around, most will just sit there lifelessly, waiting for you to bring the X.
Problems just don’t stop in this game, but away from the technical flaws, Lucha Fury is one of the most slow paced, and boring games I have ever had the displeasure of playing. Attacking an enemy with your trusty X,X,X combo will take you about 5 seconds to complete. Every single movement your character makes is so sluggish and ‘lazy’, and when 10 or so enemies are stood apart on your screen, you can imagine how long it takes. Running is slow, walking is too slow, after a while you just begin to hope that the level is over.
By the looks of the game, and a few of the character animations, the developers intended to make this quite humorous. That, it is not. How can you expect something to be funny when nobody speaks, it’s fairly hard to convey humour simply through actions. If the characters, or enemies at least had a voice and came out with a few clever quips during combat, I’m sure I may have actually found it quite funny. All you get to hear throughout is unconvincing, reused grunting noises, cawing chickens, and crazy fast Mexican music, which really doesn’t help the game since it’s so slow.
Lucha Fury has one good aspect, and I’m actually glad I can say something positive about it. The art style of the game is actually quite wonderful. Everything has a very rustic Mexican feel to it, and the characters themselves are very well thought out and designed. The menu screens especially look really nice, with the hand-painted style logo, and the messy look to it. But unfortunately the graphics of the game can’t really pull it off, the cell shaded models and environments lose that magic, and have a blandness about them. I can’t help but feel sorry for the art team, who clearly did an amazing job on this, but the gameplay, and graphics just couldn’t hold it up.
Over the past week, I have had to force myself through this monotonous mess, and it really has scarred me for life. I hope I can forget this game as soon as humanly possible, and never intend to come back to it again.
