Claws of Furry

I came into Claws of Furry expecting a low-budget Castle Crashers. What I got was something more frustrating: a game that clearly knows what it wants to be and just stops short of actually being it. The 90s-inspired comic-book look is genuinely charming, the hand-painted environments across four worlds (Slums, Sewers, Dog City, and the Mansion) pop on screen, and the boss intro animations carry real personality. Presentation is not the problem here. The problem is the combat. Your kit is light attack, heavy uppercut, a dodge roll, and a special ability that charges off kills. That is the whole toolkit across 40-plus levels. The movement itself is decent enough - tight jumps, no floatiness, and the controls respond cleanly when things are calm. But calm is rare. Enemy density spikes hard once you clear the early slum stages, and the game starts throwing projectile spam and sponge-heavy heavies at you simultaneously, which turns the dodge button from a tactical option into a panic button that often drops you into instant-kill hazards like sewer ooze. Getting bumped off a platform mid-jump by a gator you never saw coming is not difficulty, it is bad enemy placement. The permadeath mode (Im-paw-ssible) demands precise inputs that the hitbox geometry does not always reward. Pussycat mode, the checkpoint-based linear run, is the friendlier entry point, but checkpoint placement after bosses has been reported as inconsistent, and the repetitive combat loop wears thin faster in solo play than it should. There are three modes: Pussycat (checkpoint campaign), Im-paw-ssible (full permadeath run), and Catrmageddon (survival arena). Unlockable costumes, some riffing on popular superhero archetypes, carry passive bonuses like enemy freezing or health regeneration and give runs a small meta-progression layer. It is thin progression, but it is something. Online co-op is listed alongside local, and the multiplayer version scales enemy health upward while allowing player revives, which at least means the game gets harder in a predictable, manageable way rather than just punishing you more arbitrarily. Four-player couch sessions are genuinely where this thing finds its rhythm, and most of the more positive reviews lean hard on that context. Solo though? The boss fights drag because health pools are tuned for group DPS. The special ability is sometimes the only viable answer to a boss phase, which feels more like a gate than a mechanic. Steam user reception sits at 53 percent positive across a small sample, and the broader critical picture lands around a 52 on Metacritic for the Switch version - fair numbers for a game that delivers mild, inoffensive fun at its best and friction-heavy tedium at its worst. If you have three people in the room who enjoy old-school brawler chaos and low-stakes co-op chaos, there is a passable evening here. Anywhere outside that scenario, the shallow combo depth and punishing-for-wrong-reasons difficulty will clock you out well before the credits. Fred, Scout Team