Green Lava Studios has given gamers a very interesting title in Fenix Furia. Think of this game as a mash-up of Sonic: The Hedgehog, Super Mario Brothers and Braid. The outcome would be a very different type of platformer. I will say this though: the three games that I mentioned are much better than this title. While extremely unique and fun for a time, it seems to me like Fenix Furia is a one and done title. I have no desire to play this tomorrow or the next day; nothing is drawing me to it. That being said, I did have some fun with it while I was interested in the title.
The story, as with most platformers, is somewhat flimsy. The opening cut scene shows a blue cube (think tesseract from Captain America) floating through space and crashing into a planet. The protagonist gets up from his rock and goes to investigate. Basically, in each level, you are aiming to jump into the cube to be teleported to the next level. The levels are pretty short and you are timed from the get-go; basically, if you beat the game’s time, you get a special award and a trophy later. You also have the chance to grab a cookie in each level, which grants you a trophy as well if you can get all of them in a world. The first world you are thrown into is the Red Forest, which is very red, but not very forest-y.
As I said before, in each level there is a time limit to beat and a cookie to find. Most of the time the cookie is easy to get to, but sometimes you’ll bang your head against the wall trying to get the cookie just to have all the cookies. At first you can blow through the levels, but it began to get tougher and tougher as you try to get the cookie and pass the level. What makes it tougher is the fact that there are green slime squares that kill you immediately when you touch them. You have to avoid them at all costs by dodging them, jumping over them, and avoiding them completely. Sometimes it isn’t a very easy task and you’ll die multiple times.
To stay alive you have a very simple control scheme, X is jump, the left joystick is move, and R1 is dash. Not too difficult to learn, but very difficult to master. Most of the time jump isn’t as floaty as it is in this title. You’ll find yourself avoiding one dangerous square only to be hit by another. If you keep hitting X, you will stay in the air. You won’t hover though, but rather go up and up, so you have to time your X presses to succeed. Using dash will save you many deaths and help you beat the time limit to the levels, but don’t get your hopes up on beating those times; they are near superhuman. After the first ten levels in the first world, I realized that this was going to be an insanely repetitive game, and I was correct. (Stupid cube making me chase it all over tarnation.)
Fenix Furia is a fun game for a little while. I found myself getting irritated at dying all the time and how the X button would let me down. Fans of Flappy Bird may have a good time with this game, or just someone who loves doing the same thing over and over. It is fun in short spurts of time, but definitely not a game you want to marathon. Personally, if I didn’t review this game, I would never buy it. It just isn’t my cup of tea. I’m sure there are folks out there that love this type of game, but sadly I am not one of them. The title has all the qualities of a good game, good albeit flighty controls, nice graphics, and a killer soundtrack. That wasn’t enough to keep me vested though. I’m not a fan of repetition, which is why this game didn’t mesh well with me.