Brutal - Paws of Fury

The nineties were a golden era for fighting games, and every other studio wanted to grab a slice of the pie that Mortal Kombat had baked. Most of those attempts ended up in the dustbin of history. Brutal: Paws of Fury from 1995 by GameTek is one of the few games where I still remember, thirty years later, why I even fired it up in the first place.

The concept is deliberately absurd. The Dalai Lama — or rather the Dalai Llama, because the main villain is a llama as an animal — runs a fighting school, and you must fight your way through it to face him in single combat at the end. The fighters are exclusively animals: a kangaroo, a bear, a tiger, and other creatures with kicks and hooks. On paper it sounds like a children's carnival parade, but the game carries itself with all the seriousness of the genre, and it's precisely in that contrast where its charm lies.

The gameplay mirrors the established patterns of the genre — six buttons, special moves performed through joystick sequences, a series of combos. On the PC version of the time, it worked quite well, even though keyboard input never had the comfort of an arcade stick. Each character has their own set of moves, and mastering them takes a while. The difficulty isn't trivial; the AI in later matches uncompromisingly punishes players who rely on one repeated combo. The game simply forces you to think a bit.

What set Brutal apart from the sea of MK clones was its visual style. Digitized animations of the animal fighters looked surprisingly clean and humorous at the same time. Blood doesn't flow here — instead, teeth and stars fly around like in a cartoon. Today it has aged well in the sense that it's retained its own identity. What has aged poorly is the keyboard controls and a certain stiffness in the mode offerings; there wasn't much to do outside of the main arcade scheme.

Anyone picking up Brutal: Paws of Fury today should know what they're getting into. It's not Mortal Kombat and it's not Street Fighter either. It's a solid second-tier fighting game with the charisma that the vast majority of clones lacked. You can play it in your browser without any installation or hunting for drivers — exactly how a title that nobody was waiting for, but that surprised us all, deserves to be rediscovered.