ZEROlife Games, Fishing Cactus and Maximum Entertainment present Samurai Academy: Paws of Fury. Anthropomorphic animals, kid friendly violence, bright cartoony graphics. All the markings of a good, fun and engaging title. But does it have anything to make it stand out from the ocean of other similar titles?

“The village of Kakamucho is under attack by the Shogun’s cat armies! Join Hank, a dog samurai in a world of cats, and his friends as they reveal a sinister plot and save the day, samurai-style. Slash, dash, and laugh through this wacky third-person action adventure.”

Apparently, Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank is a 2022 animated kids’ film that is a remake of Blazing Saddles, I’m guessing with far less use of a certain word. I’ve never seen it, but this game is said to be sequel to that movie. From the second I picked up my pad to play, Samurai Academy: Paws of Fury annoyed me. This was the opening tutorial too… and I hadn’t even moved my character yet. The issue was a massively, over sensitive camera. It was almost uncontrollable. Thankfully, there is an option to tinker with the sensitively and I did find a setting that worked. After which, it was onto learning the basics of the platforming… which felt wrong. It’s like there’s a half a second delay between you moving the stick/pressing a button and the character acting. There’s this slight lag that is off putting and makes some aspects of the game unnecessarily tricky.

Samurai Academy is split into three different gameplay styles. You have a 3D platforming/adventure thing where you can explore little open-world hubs (there are three of them), do side-quests. buy cosmetics, talk to characters, collect coins, and such. There’s a raid which is like a tower defence, but not. Then there are trials which switches things to a 2.5D platformer where you have to race along an obstacle course. The 3D platforming/adventure element of the game is where you’ll be spending most of your time and it is easily the most enjoyable of the three. There’s lots to do, characters to meet and such. Plenty of variation, the side-quests are never demanding and everything is kept light and fun.

The raid/tower defence bit is a great addition, if flawed. You get 15 maps to play on, which keeps things fresh. But the overall design of the tower defence mechanic is not all that great and a bit too simplistic. There there is the third gameplay style, the 2.5D platformer obstacle course. There’s are awful, mainly due to that lag in the controls that I mentioned (I hope this gets fixed). These obstacle courses will see you racing against an AI opponent that never makes a mistake… ever. Due to the control lag, you will make mistakes.

Around £20 and available now on PC and all the consoles, Samurai Academy: Paws of Fury is a good game that could do with some tweaking and refinements. I was honestly expecting this to be a bit of a trainwreck, lazy animated movie tie-in, as with a lot of similar titles. But no, Samurai Academy is a pretty good package with some variation to the gameplay that’ll keep you entertained for a few hours. It’ll hardly change the landscape of gaming, and it is all too similar to other title of its ilk, but I did find myself enjoying this more than I thought I would. It’s a fun, light game that is worth a playthrough once. For a budget price of £20, you get a very playable title that could, with an update or two, be much better.