Nandrew: Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present to you our second Dev.Mag Collaborative Review Thing™, partially because the first one was so fun and mostly because Rock, Paper, Shotgun have not yet sued us for stealing their idea.

Chippit: ... and because the Wolfire guys were nice enough to unexpectedly drop a copy of Lugaru in our inboxes. Lugaru being, of course, the predecessor of Wolfire's current project, Overgrowth.

Nandrew: It's an old game, but we feel it deserves a mention here. Not least because we've been following the Overgrowth blog for months already.

Chippit: And because it has bunnies.

Bunnies!

Nandrew: Oh, and bunnies. Yeah. In fact, it's the only game I know of where you can have one cute bunny sneak up behind another cute bunny and MURDER it.

Chippit: BY BREAKING ITS SPINE.

Nandrew: I'll never look at rabbits in the same way again.

Chippit: I never trusted the bastards anyway.

Nandrew: Which brings us to the heart of Lugaru: it's a third person brawler thing. With rabbits. For insane people.

Chippit: Because it's brutal. Brutal meaning both violent and HARD. In fact, because Nandrew's such a wuss, he had to play it on easy to finish it. :P

Nandrew: Gah! To be fair, I've been spoiled by most mainstream fighters, where the AI collapses after you sneeze in the right direction.

Chippit: I think it's not so much about the resilience of enemies, though. I mean, it's a common trait for games to just give enemies bucketloads of health so you can smack mindlessly away at them until they keel over spectacularly. It's more about how the enemies react to how the player fights

You can't just mash buttons and hope to win, because the AI will punish you.

Nandrew: Yeah, it required stuff like "timing your moves correctly" and "analysing enemies". My, my, such exotic concepts! I mean, it's all very well and good to press SHIFTSHIFTSHIFTSHIFTSHIFT but if you're just spamming, and not CONCENTRATING, the game immediately figures it out and punishes you. Which puts a lot of mainstream fighters into perspective, actually, since they tend to hold your hand with this sort of thing, sometimes to a ludicrous extent.

Chippit: This makes the combat system weak in anything except 1-on-1 fights, though. I mean, sure, it's not realistic to be able to maul an entire horde of enemies and send them sprawling, but it sure as hell is fun. It all breaks down when more than one enemy gets involved in Lugaru, which is why the game always splits up its enemies (or gives you a way to split them up). But that aside, I really like the system.

Countering MY attacks?

Nandrew: Agreed. The strongest point, in my opinion: move balance. I used every trick in the book to fight my enemies, which is in stark contrast to the cardinal sin that's committed by almost any other fighter out there: allowing players to play repetitively. I mean, I consider games like Force Unleashed and even the original God of War, where the player was offered a fantastic amount of moves, but only one or two were ever really used.

Chippit: On that note, though, I did find the 'trip+standing kick' combo highly effective against all enemies. It didn't particularly hurt much, but it landed 9/10 times, which is more than I can say for the rabbit kick.

Nandrew: I had a rather different experience, to be honest. With any move I made, there were two penalties: (1) the AI smarted up against that move, and could more easily counter it in future, or (2) your score lessened for every subsequent hit you made with the same move. Which isn't a biggie the first time through, but is a significant factor in replays and the challenge levels. I mean, I went and looked up some videos and guides after playing through the first time: good Lugaru players are absolutely batshit insane at what they do, and it really makes me realise that this game revolves around skill rather than mashing.

Chippit: Oh, yeah, I agree completely. The combat system has a remarkable amount of depth.

Nandrew: Advanced tactics prove that you can do some surprising stuff. For example, jumping, back-flipping in midair and landing DIRECTLY behind an enemy, then following with a quick mouse tap will result in a stealth fatality before they can react. There's some really sick Lugaru pros on the Internet.

Chippit: Yeah, well, that explains the existence of higher difficulty levels. Strangely enough, I'm reminded a bit of Savage when I think about Lugaru now. It was similarly rough, also built around a simple but powerful combat system, and also filled with people who became incredibly good because the system allowed it. 'course, its system had nowhere near as much depth as Lugaru's.