Furwind

When you go to developer Boomfire Games' website, it tells you that they make "today's games with yesterday's feelings." That's a pretty good description of what you get with Furwind, a side-scrolling platformer that sees a cutesy mascot character fight an evil forest monster in order to save his friends. It's a 16-bit adventure that looks and sounds the part, giving us an authentic experience that would have fit in nicely next to the likes of Mr. Nutz and Ardy Lightfoot. But in a world with so many throwback platformers, is that enough?

This is the story of what happens when an evil cult known as Darhun wakes up an ancient demon who had been tucked away deep inside the forest. That's bad, but what makes it even worse is that the local village has been consumed in flames and the survivors have been captured. It's up to a small fox named Furwind to go on a harrowing quest to stop the cult and bring peace back to the forest.

That's not going to be easy, because Furwind is not your typical action hero. This fox wasn't chosen for having super strength or some other helpful mutant ability, he's just a guy who fell into the role of being a hero. He starts the game with little more than a tail smack and a double jump, but if he survives long enough to make it through the 15 stages found in the three chapters, he'll learn new abilities that will shoot him through the air like a rocket, toss around a projectile attack and heal up when your health is low.

The three chapters are split up into several types of levels. We start out with a traditional forest stage full of secrets to uncover. There's a tower you need to climb while dodging fireballs and bottomless pits. We also see levels where you're being chased high up in the air by a wall of shadow arms. And then there's an especially challenging underground stage where you'll need to keep picking up fireflies in order to see where you're going. Each of these stages have you looking for the two boss fights, each of which contain half of the idol you're trying to pick up. Once you've combined the two halves of the idol, it's off to find the exit to uncover the next stage.

On top of beating up bosses and finding idols, you'll also need to take on several of the side-quests in order to trigger the bigger fights. These bonus missions will trap you in much smaller stages and want you to defeat all the bad guys or destroy a glowing statue. The objectives are usually pretty easy, but completing them can be incredibly tough, especially as we near the end of the game.

As much as it pains me to say it, a lot of the difficulty comes from a combination of laggy controls and claustrophobic level designs. This is one of those 2D platformers where the jump controls are off just enough to cause real problems in the more challenging stages. I played through the game on the Switch, and no matter if I used the Joy-Cons or the Pro Controller, I couldn't shake the feeling that the inputs had a bit of lag. This made otherwise simple stages a lot more frustrating than they should have been, and it's one of the big reasons why I'm not more excited about Furwind.

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As I mentioned a moment ago, another problem is the level designs. Some of the stages are fine, such as ascending that tower, but too much of the game has you stuck in tight areas with no place to move. This isn't helped any by our hero's pitiful short-range tail attack. It's entirely too easy to get badly injured by cheap hits, almost entirely because Furwind has the worst melee strike possible. And don't forget that every swing of that tail uses up a little bit stamina, so there are times where the fox can't even swing that tail until he charges up a meter. None of this makes any sense to me.

I'm also thoroughly underwhelmed by the new abilities Furwind learns along the way. Shooting himself through the air seems useful at first, but I doubt I used it more than ten times throughout the course of the entire game. Same with the projectile attack, which you get right at the very end of the adventure. It doesn't do much damage and can only be fired a limited amount of times. About the most useful skill is the one that heals our hero fox, but that just seems like an excuse to stop dropping random health pickups. What's disappointing is that this game wouldn't change at all if these abilities weren't included. You wouldn't even notice they were missing.

That's a shame, because Boomfire Games has all the ingredients for an incredible side-scrolling platformer. I like the 16-bit graphics and the look of the character, as well as the boss designs and wide-open levels. They made some smart decisions that lead to a charming game that seems like the kind of thing I would normally fall in love with. Unfortunately, the repetitive stages, laggy controls, bland power-ups and predictable story left me underwhelmed. It's not bad, but Furwind the fox deserves a more exciting adventure.