The SEGA 32X was a failure, but certainly not a boring failure. The mushroom-shaped power booster for the Genesis was a fascinating experiment and IGN Retro is going through its catalog one game at a time, reviewing each and every one in a new series: 32X Review-a-Day.
Street Fighter II was nothing if not a phenomenon. And when a game explodes like Street Fighter II did, the clones follow like clockwork. Naturally, not all imitators are bad news. For example, SNK's King of Fighters and Midway's Mortal Kombat carved pleasant niches of their own in Guile's wake. But beyond a select few rivals, the field is littered with broken brawlers like Primal Rage and Time Killers. Gametek's Brutal, though, is a special failure because despite a heavy advertising push and an effort to publish it on every console imaginable in 1994, it just landed with a terrific thud. Make that a deserved terrific thud.
Brutal: Above the Claw is a 32X port of the fighter which adds very little above the existing editions of the game. Perhaps it's a little more colorful or is a touch faster. Whatever Gametek added, it didn't matter; Brutal is an awful fighter that should be excluded from any respectable cartridge collection.
The entire hook of the game is the casting. The fighters are all anthropomorphic animals with a lame hint of TMNT 'tude. There's Karate Croc all decked out like Ryu, Tai Cheetah in Ken-like red pants, Kung Fu Bunny, and the sad Splinter knock-off Pantha. And lest I forget: Psycho Kitty, a tweaker cat with swirly eyes. (He's crazy!) Just being told that a cast of characters is cool doesn't make it so. Simply taping an afro to a lion's head does not increase his hipness. Not even if you give him a guitar rock special attack. None of these fighters are interesting in the least.
On the other hand, the entire flow of the game does have promise. Your chosen hero is stripped of special moves at the start of the single-player game. You must earn specials by playing through the stages and impressing a llama. Every time you get a new move, you earn a password so you can "log" back into the game later and pick right up with your improved fighter. The only catch is that you start from the beginning of the tournament, but at least those new moves should help you speedily move through the early stages.
There is also a board game-esque mode where you place fighters on a map and then try to take over hubs by fighting your opponent. That's a cool way to frame fights outside of a story mode.
Of course, these intriguing features are wholly negated by a messy fighting system that rewards button mashing and luck instead of honest skill. Seriously, the computer is all over the map. One match, it's a push-over. The next, it's merciless. In one game, Kung Fu Bunny pushed me into a corner with some windmill kick and never let up. There was no way to get a move in edgewise and he just dropped me after a few moments of unplayable chaos. That's awesome -- I have no specials yet, but Kung Fu Bunny can scissor kick me until the Ninja Cows come home.
The art in Brutal is bad. Who cares how fluid the animation is (and it is) if the characters are completely uninteresting to look at and devoid of any real personality? Kung Fu Bunny looks like he was designed in about eight minutes. Design lead to artist: "Quick! Gimme a tall rabbit with purple pants! I don't care if his mouth isn't proportional!" The backdrops are a bit better. They are clean and colorful, such as the water cave and the swamp bridge.
The audio fares no better than the characters. The grunts and effects of the fights are utterly charmless and repeated to the point you will hit the mute button. The music themes are also looped botches with little inspiration.
Brutal is zero fun from start to finish. The fighting is lop-sided, unfair, and rarely enjoyable. The cast is without charm. The two things the game does right -- the progression of special moves and the board game -- are undone by poor AI and bad controls. If you are building a 32X collection, steer wide around this car crash.
