There’s only so much stuff-hitting one furry can do. Unfortunately, Dust: An Elysian Tail does show its hand a little too early, becoming familiar and repetitive like many of the classic brawlers it shares its heritage with. It’s not particularly difficult to rack up huge combo numbers against less-than-intelligent foes, and for a good few hours the raw satisfaction of the combat is enough to drag you from one sumptuous background to the next. Instead, though, there’s a reasonably deep and technical fighting system underpinning the action one which owes a debt to the likes of The Dishwasher and Viewtiful Joe before it.Īs Dust, the spectacularly emo protagonist of this Saturday morning cartoon that never was, you can smack seven shades of sprites out of anything in your way, chaining huge combos, tossing baddies into the sky with launchers, and landing savage coup-de-grace finishers. With sweeping visuals and vibrant backgrounds, the development team at Humble Hearts could have just shoved in a one-button control system and still found a captivate audience, even if it was solely comprised of furries. This flat-planed brawler, the last of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade for 2012, has a lot more going on between its furry ears than it has any right to. Dust: An Elysian Tail effortlessly taps into that still-furtive part of my own brain, but it has a harder time winning over the part of my cerebellum that’s suffered through a thousand bad games since those glorious yesteryear days. It’s very easy to get swept along by beauty, especially if you’re a nostalgist and the pretty thing in question is a two-dimensional brawler that harks back to the heyday of the Amiga, the era of parallax scrolling and sprites, joysticks and better times.