Fly Fu Review (PS Minis)

Fly Fu is weird. Invictus' side-scrolling brawler uses a combination of doodles and dead flies to make up its graphical style. It's certainly makes for a unique look, and it works better than you might think.

Being aware of the concept, we expected to go in to find weak, sluggish animation. We were wrong. Fly Fu's actually brilliantly well animated. The combat works well, assigning kick moves to the Circle button, and punch moves to the X button. There's plenty of moves on offer, and while the gameplay falls into button-bash territory, the variety of the contextual attacks available keeps the game looking fresh.

The game's story mode (split across five chapters) has you in pursuit of your mothfriend (hey, flies fall in love too). For some reason she's been kidnapped by an angry set of beetles, and having been taught the basics of martial arts by a friendly grasshopper, you're set in pursuit of your true love. Unfortunately, Fly Fu's campaign amounts to little more than a scrolling background and waves of enemies. You're given a quota of enemies to defeat at the start of the level, and that's pretty much it. While it's true that brawlers such as Final Fight and Streets Of Rage work in a similar way, the game always makes you feel like there's something new around the corner. Fly Fu never does that, and as such it ends up feeling mighty repetitive. There are weapons dotted around the stages to give you a bit of a temporary power-boost, and a Berserk bar helps you to unleash some devastating attacks once you've filled it. Each level ends in a boss-fight but, while charming to look at, they amount to little more than further button bashing.

A survival mode turns the campaign on its head (instead of beating a quota, you're trying to fight for as long as possible), but there's not much else to say about Fly Fu.