Lugaru is the sort of action/hack-and-slash game I wanted to play when I was younger. There’s a little bit of a story (if cliched) and complicated key combinations that remind me of arcade fighting games. Yet, this is not the game for me now.

Lugaru had me quickly bored and uninterested. The learning curve for mastering your character’s various movements and timing of rabbit-fu is quite steep and I didn’t feel the desire to want to master the controls. Not to mention, the AI always seemed to be able to catch/counter my movements yet in reverse, it was very difficult for me to counter my enemy’s. This made it difficult for me to defeat my enemies.

The game takes place in small chunks. There is a tutorial level that introduces you to the movement capabilities of your rabbit character and doesn’t hurt to spend a lot of time messing around in. However, I put the game down after finishing the tutorial and didn’t start up the story until the next day and by then, I had forgotten a lot of the moves. Each stage has a small objective, usually defeating opponents in order to move on. The character does suggest what to do, such as taking out sentries or sneaking up behind NPCs to take them out. I found open combat was pretty much expected. No Assassin’s Creed here.

The world is expansive and one of the things I set out to do was to explore the map. This was before I figured out that all of the events take place in a concentrated area, despite the illusion of a very open world. It was also a difficult task to return to the main area of activity after wandering off for a few minutes. Then, I realized the map at the bottom corner of my screen, with a low opacity that it practically blended into the scenery. The lack of UI was a little difficult because I didn’t know how many hits my character could take before dying.

I didn’t care much for the aesthetics. I understand that Lugaru was written more or less from scratch by one person and I have great respect for that. Nonetheless, the general gameplay was not very appealing to me. Admittedly, I didn’t bother playing for the entire week and I could have written this review sooner, but I wanted to give it until the end of the week to see if my interest sparked up. It didn’t.