The game is laid out as a storybook, with the player telling the rest of the tale as you play through the adventure. Each chapter represents a level, and once you’ve completed a chapter, you can make repeat visits to collect crystals (which earn you extra lives) or other goodies using powers acquired later in the game. It’s not an innovative concept by any means, but it’s still a fine presentation, especially for an abbreviated WiiWare offering.

Similar to LittleBigPlanet, there are checkpoints along the way where your Furballs will re-spawn should you die, which will happen often. Of course, once you lose all of your lives, it’s back to the beginning of the level. I’m not one for having a game hold my hand, but again, Furry Legends’ challenges are mostly born from a need to conform to poor level design, floaty mechanics, and various bugs and glitches. Redoing the same masochistic segments in hopes the journey will eventually begin to shine isn’t the most entertaining way to spend a few hours. When the jaunt finally wraps up and you’re still left with a barely functional platformer, you’re likely going to feel cheated.

Unfortunately, the game’s production values do precious little to ease the blow of mind-numbingly painful gameplay. The background textures are low-poly and lack detail, and the screen will often jitter spastically when your critters move to a certain area of the environment. The designers do a decent job of leading players along with intelligent camera cues, though the overall world of Furland is generic.

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The music also suffers from being completely unremarkable, and the sound effects offer little in the way of enhancing gameplay. Surprisingly, there’s text dialogue aplenty, and we can all be thankful the developers give players the options to skip past all of it. The writing is second-rate at best, with double entendres that will likely go over the heads of younger gamers whilst eliciting shameful eye rolls from mature audiences.

Furry Legends hobbles its way onto WiiWare as a dysfunctional annoyance that left me begging for relief. To be perfectly honest, there are some chestnuts to be found, but they lay buried beneath a mass of platforming desecration. The movement and forward momentum of the Furballs doesn’t match up well with the level design. ; Add a physics system that wreaks the wrong kinds of havoc to this equation, and you’ve got a game that ends up being all about frustration rather than fun. The developers obviously know what they like, and with this game, they seem eager to share that with the world. Unfortunately, the expertise and creativity that accompany many of Furry Legends’ inspirations are sorely lacking here.

By Tony Capri
CCC Freelance Writer