Samurai Academy: Paws of Fury

Genre: 3D Platformer / Action-Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank is a 2022 animated film that sought to remake the classic bawdy comedy Western film Blazing Saddles as a family-friendly samurai film. I think it’s safe to say this film didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, so it’s odd to see it receive a videogame tie-in sequel three years later in 2025, releasing on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch.

The presentation here is… okay. The 3D characters and environments are sufficient, though far from anything impressive (and even suffers from slowdown in places), and the pseudo-Japanese traditional music of this game’s soundtrack works, but the voice acting… oof.

Look, I don’t expect them to hire the likes of Michael Cera and Samuel L. Jackson to reprise their film roles here, but the actors they got to replace them not only sound nothing like the voices they’re replacing, but their line delivery is possibly the most wooden, unnatural voice acting I have ever heard in my life. Seriously, this is just absolutely terrible to the point where I wondered if maybe it was a stylization thing, like trying to copy the wooden line delivery of dubbed kung fu flicks… but no, because the film itself uses natural line delivery.

For the gameplay itself, you have a pretty large open area and then individual challenge stages you can jump to. The open area has occasional enemies to fight and cat-shaped coins to collect, though the game doesn’t really provide you with any reason to seek them out. As for the challenge stages, you have 2D platformer races, as well as Action stages that have you protecting a town that play out a little like a Tower Defense game, though you have to manually move around and set off traps you armed yourself in between enemy waves.

These town defense gameplay segments can actually be a bit enjoyable, but the game has some serious problems otherwise. The platforming is not very good, with limited, unsatisfying jumps. Also pretty terrible is the combat, with attacks that don’t feel like they have any sort of significant impact beyond pushing back damage sponge enemies and stunning them for a moment. And the camera is just awful moving far too quickly for subtle control. I will give this game credit for letting players use gyroscopic motion control to aim when shooting arrows, but beyond that, nothing you do in this game feels satisfying.

I do think that Samurai Academy is more than a lazy film tie-in, but it’s absolutely a rough one, with terrible voice acting, an uncooperative camera, and… the deal-breaker has to be that this is an Action-Platformer where neither the action nor the platforming is satisfying. As a result, unless you’re a fan of the film, this is a game to skip.

tl;dr – Samurai Academy is the videogame tie-in and sequel of sorts to the film Paws of Fury, and while it has some decent gameplay variety and potentially enjoyable town defense stages, just about everything you do in the game is unsatisfying, from the platforming to combat. Plus, this is some of the worst voice acting I’ve encountered in a videogame. Unless you’re a major fan of the film, skip this.

Grade: C-

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