Lugaru HD

this game is completely unhinged, it feels insanely smooth to play, it's a little bit broken, it's both nostalgic and disturbing, and it paved the way for an even more polished game in overgrowth. even still, this game is a hidden gem worth experiencing if you're into the surreal nature of some late shareware :3 ! you are also a bunnay and i like that

parkour and combat, simple controls but challenging gameplay

[table] [tr] [th][h1] My Playthrough [/h1][/th] [th]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yC9hMxWbgs[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td][h1]The Review[/h1][/td] [td]A game that is as hard as balls. The controls are very clunky but once you get used to it it can be fun until you get to the last level.[/td] [/tr] [/table]

lugaru is fun and has some different combat options compared to overgrowth, most notably how the hop kick is a dropkick instead here and rarely works, and the quad "feral" run with tackle. Honestly it's worth just getting overgrowth over this if it's in the question, this campaign is incredibly short and gets repetitive halfway through. Eventually staffs and wolves will get involved, but the combat falls in the issue of only really rewarding you for reversals. Directly attacking feels like an rng game of hoping the ai doesn't just tell you "no" to an attack. Sometimes even reversals don't work with large groups or wolves. So you then need to cheese the air flipping that distracts the ai in order to land clean attacks which just subverts any aspect of an interesting combat system. You can't combo, you can't block or feed a parry to a follow up, there's recovery move, but you can't counter or directly attack from that position. So because of all this the game feels awfully one-note after a few hours, but because the story doesn't really last longer than that, it doesn't overstay its welcome. Luckily if you found the game to be captivating and you want more,there IS an entire modding scene that's been active since 2005 to look through. Unfortunately while they all were preserved in the forums and a third party launcher that would auto download any fan-campaign, they even had their own section in the wolfire discord for a while! These have been eviscerated and are no longer accessible. If you find the more modern wolfire games lugaru forum, you can find a couple modded campaigns, but they're not anything more than some custom maps with a set amount of enemies, so you might as well just do the challenge mode :/ I will say though it's probably worth it to play through this over the overgrowth remake maps. Both because this is small, and has different combat mechanics, but primarily because they strangely retconned the story for the worse in the built-in overgrowth remake. Generally just deciding Turner was always an edgy murderous ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ instead of becoming that through the toll of this games story. They change the ending completely so it doesn't make sense how turner ended up in his position at the start of overgrowth. It's just strange and while the writing isn't exactly great, it's still . . . alright? Like it has a lot of flaws, but none of them make this game effectively worse, and I'd expect you'd get this by purchasing overgrowth since this is included. Since I feel that it's worth playing through this over the remake campaign, yeah I'd recommend it.

Some of the coolest melee combat to ever grace your screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Qh0OzmC2o

Lugaru HD is the lesser known game from the devs who made Overgrowth. Pros: + Great story + Decent atmosphere and sound design + Additional challenge options + Controller support Cons: - Unfair combat mechanics allow the enemy to block and parry your attacks, but you cannot do the same. You only have one unarmed attack which can be executed in only two different ways, and two armed attacks. This makes the game more tedious and frustration, than fun - No modern HD resolutions - Menus do not use custom controls - Poor music looping Mixed: ~ Some story elements are quite dark I wanted to both like and finish this game, but the unfair combat mechanics stopped me from doing both. Best to spend your time playing the better game and spiritual successor to this that is Overgrowth, instead. Overall Rating: 2 out of 5