Brutal: Paws of Fury

Available Platforms: Genesis, Amiga

Brutal: Paws of Fury is a competitive beat-em-up created by GameTek for SEGA CD and Mega Drive/Genesis in 1994.

Year	1994
Genre	Beat-'em-up
Rating	80/100 based on 8 Editorial reviews. Add your vote
Publisher	GameTek
Developer	GameTek
OS supported	Win7 64 bit, Win8 64bit, Windows 10, MacOS 10.6+
Updated	16 December 2022

Game Review

Brutal: Paws of Fury is a competitive beat-em-up created by GameTek for SEGA CD and Mega Drive/Genesis in 1994. The game was also ported and released for the Amiga, SNES, and MS-DOS.

Unlike Mortal Kombat with its hyper-realistic graphics, or Street Fighter II, which had human combatants (though with fantasy powers), Paws of Fury features a cast of animal fighters. Much like a Disney movie, you will have heroes such as Ivan the Bear, Tai Cheetah, Prince Leon of Kenya, Rhei Rat, and others. All drawn like cartoons. Not to mention Kung-Fu Bunny, which makes you wonder if Pixar didn't take inspiration from this game when they created Kung Fu Panda in 2008. Maybe. Funnily, the final boss to defeat is Dali Llama - a llama, of course. Hopefully, the religious leader didn't get offended by the reference.

The Amiga version is a faithful conversion of the Mega Drive one, excluding the controls, that use 3 buttons in the SEGA version, something not possible on the Amiga version where the joystick has one button only. On the other hand, the Amiga version, thanks to better compression, features two additional characters. With the CD32 version, you have both 3 buttons and the additional characters!

It is probably not the best fighting game you can find out there, but if you like cartoon graphics and are willing to try something different, Brutal: Paws of Fury can be quite charming.

Review by: Manu
Published: 17 December 2020 5:29 pm