Honest Review: Conker's Bad Fur Day

xandermartin98 HONEST REVIEW: CONKER'S BAD FUR DAY

You know, I've covered a lot of games that I personally consider to be INCREDIBLY overrated (the god-awful Parappa 1 notwithstanding), but honestly, this one just about takes the (seafood) cake. Everybody give it up for Conker's Bad Fur Day, the absolute most overhyped pile of graphical-showoff mediocrity since pretty much every other game made by the so-called "golden age" Rareware besides Perfect Dark and possibly the Donkey Kong Country trilogy (and yes, that DEFINITELY includes the ENTIRE Banjo-Kazooie series as well). Anyway, let's dig into this great mighty turd, shall we?

STORY: I'll admit, this game is actually pretty creative in this regard (still HORRIBLY immature and unfunny to boot regardless, but I digress); opening up with Conker the bushy-tailed ginger squirrel getting deathly drunk at the local pub, tripping over his own tail and falling into a cold, dark ravine with nothing but an equally drunk scarecrow to keep him company and then proceeding to take him through an increasingly random and insanely vulgar (for the time and ESPECIALLY the art style) series of events ranging from fighting the aforementioned giant sentient mountain of cow dung in a grandly epic opera face-off to re-enacting Saving Private Ryan but with robotic serial-killer teddy bears instead of Nazis, all while the evil Panther King and his hilariously stereotypically German mad-scientist servant Von Kriplespac are diabolically plotting to use him as a replacement leg for the former's royal milk table...

and in the end, it all culminates in him using the giant forklift robot straight out of Alien to fight one of the Xenomorphs from the exact same film (after it suddenly bursts out of the aforementioned evil Panther King's chest) and becoming the new king of his land, upon which he immediately begins coldly reflecting Clockwork-Orange-style on the fact that he'll never be able to properly visit his girlfriend again, not to mention how dreadfully boring BEING a king is in general. Honestly, this is probably one of the only truly dark moments of the entire game. Anyway, moving on from the second to the absolute FIRST most overrated thing about this game...

HUMOR: Jesus CHRIST, is this game tryhard and unfunny. Basically, before Happy Tree Friends was a painfully blatant Bad Fur Day wannabe, Bad Fur Day itself was an even MORE painfully blatant wannabe South Park...only without most of the things that made South Park actually GOOD. Remember when Mike Matei made that one horrendously racist and stupid Loco Bandito comic with pointless toilet humor and tasteless national stereotypes out the wazoo? Well, if you don't, then you should definitely consider yourself lucky, but anyway, THAT absolute garbage right there in honestly not too far from actually being the level of comedic sophistication we're dealing with with this overrated sack of drivel.

No, it's not funny just because it's painstakingly loaded to the brim with pointlessly pop-culture-referencing cutaway gags (cough, Family Guy, cough). It's not funny just because the characters say and do incredibly shocking things for what appears at first glance to be a kids' game. No, it's not automatically funny just because it's satire. And no, it's ESPECIALLY not funny just because it has an entire area literally made out of poop (although I will admit that the giant opera-singing PILE of poop you eventually fight IN this area is indeed a rather amazingly memorable comedic and musical highlight OF the game, if nothing else).

I mean, granted, it's at least funnier than MOST of the games that try to go for the type of comedic focus that it has, but exactly HOW it manages to be regarded as the so-called "#1 funniest game ever" over games like Portal, Psychonauts and UmJammer Lammy is just COMPLETELY beyond me. Anyway, moving on...

GRAPHICS: It's made by golden-age Rareware, enough said.

For real though, its graphics just might actually be one of this game's very few (almost) redeeming qualities. Its cartoon style is executed ball-busting perfectly despite the game using 3D models on an extremely primitive 3D console, everything is deliciously bright, crisp and colorful as far as the eye can see, and the characters themselves are about as beautifully animated as you can get.

SOUND: Conker weirdly and randomly slipping between American and British accents during conversations aside, BFD's voice acting is overall quite well-done, but where it REALLY shines is in its absurdly high musical production budget (again, something we came to expect from 90s Rareware) and the fact that the music itself is so hilariously blatantly Looney Toons that it actually hurts. Anyway, moving on to the thing that I hate the absolute MOST about this game...

GAMEPLAY: UGGGGGGH...good LORD, was this game a ROYAL pain in the arse to play through. Now, granted, it isn't ridiculously hard like Battletoads, it doesn't send you all the way back to the beginning of the game if and when you Game Over like Battletoads (and SNES Star Fox), and its controls admittedly aren't QUITE as bad as those of Battletoads and Donkey Kong Country...but the actual level design and ESPECIALLY game design going on here is just flat-out embarrassing when compared to Banjo-Kazooie (which, even at its best, REALLY wasn't even that great either in retrospect).

There's barely ANY actual platforming in the game, Conker's melee attack is overall useless, the falling damage is so ridiculously strict that you literally can't even fall off the roof of an average-sized barn without crippling your stinking legs from it (god dammit, Fallout 3), and excusing the inevitable pun, simply moving around in this game feels incredibly squirrelly.

Worst of all, this game also boasts the infamous Super Mario Galaxy issue of removing basically ALL of the exploration elements from its predecessor (Banjo-Kazooie in this case), since everything is so heavily scripted and "context sensitive" that it allows basically NO deviation whatsoever from its singular, extremely strictly defined intended path of progression. Seriously, the game barely even has its own hub world; what the hell GIVES, Rareware? I honestly don't even LIKE Banjo-Kazooie at ALL, but as a GAME, I would GLADLY take it over THIS irritating slog any day.

OVERALL: This is without a doubt THE most overrated game on the Nintendo 64. Yes, I get it, you could also make an argument for Mario 64 (Sunshine was better) and Ocarina Of Time (Majora's Mask overall was WAY better), but at least those two were actually legitimately GOOD flipping games. At the end of the day, this game is boring and unfunny beyond belief and gets an honest-to-god 4.5/10

Comments

Conkers Bad Fur is good game but at the same time is extremely overrated plus the story makes zero sense I mean seriously the whole plot of the Panther King trying to capture Conker to use him as a missing leg for his broken table instead of buying a new table is just plain stupid, plus Conkers Bad Fur Day kind of feels like watching Fritz the Cat only not as good. - egnomac