A while back there was a game released in conjunction with a live action short by the name of Kung Fury. No matter how many people told me it was awesome, I refused to even glance at it. A beat ‘em up with no movement sounded about as entertaining as watching the blood poor from my fallen enemies. Thankfully, along came Iron Snout, which is making me eat my words, all while standing in the middle of the screen.

Since there isn’t any narrative to be found, I decided to make my own – you play as the fourth pig that the storybooks failed to mention. While his brothers were off building houses, he was training with the legendary Wang-Fu Bacon on a journey to rid the world of the mangy flea bitten wolves that keep eating his delicious kin. Upon completion of his training, he returned home to find all of his brothers dead, due to the wolves being even craftier in their efforts – dressing up as Miley Cyrus and knocking in the brick wall with her token wrecking ball and sledgehammer combo. With no survivors, our pig hero sets off on a quest for revenge.

Now, most of that was a load of crap… well, really all of it except for the Miley Cyrus bit, because that is a thing in the world of Iron Snout. The game starts off small, tasking you with using our pudgy pre-glazed protagonist to pop a few balloons. After a few rounds of this, the local wolves take offense to you destroying their toys and decide to attack from all directions. Using either your trusty left thumb stick or face buttons, you’ll simply time your attacks to either evade, counter, or attack the furry villains. While most of the attacks are basic combos, through practice you’ll learn jump attacks as well as devastating uppercuts, all of which will be required by the time it’s all said and done to combat each of the variety of enemies. This will continue, with more and more wolves jumping into the fray until you fall from taking too much damage.

The combat is extremely fluid, especially when using the thumb stick method, allowing you to switch directions and rack up staggering combos with ease. While the face button option is passable, I found the stick to be the best way to play. The biggest challenge comes in the form of finding out which attack is best suited for which enemy type, as some of the hounds will guard against certain attacks, or in some cases, be invulnerable and require you to use other means; such as guiding a rocket propelled wolf into a crowd for an ultra-gory explosion. If explosions are not your thing, you can also catch or launch melee weaponry that is dropped from the enemy forces, often leaving you with a satisfying visual of a hatchet or knife buried into the face of an attacker.

Despite the storybook style visuals, this is extremely violent and not for the faint of heart. For every whacky item or enemy type, there are at least three others that will dismember or destroy anything in sight, leaving nothing but a pile of body parts and blood in its wake. This isn’t the first game that allows you to take a chainsaw and cut off an enemy’s head, only to do a Bend It Like Beckham kick at a row of new combatants, but it’s one of the more hilarious ones. Now, I am not saying violence equates a good game, but it helps, especially when the game would be mediocre at best without it (I’m looking at you Creepy Road). 

The game offers a few variations in terms of play, but outside of the two player mode, which is stationary volleyball, they don’t differ all that much. With only three backdrops, each coming with their own set of enemies and a handful of other unlockables, there really isn’t much here after the initial shock and awe of seeing cutesy characters rip each other limb from limb. After an hour or so, I was ready to move on, having maxed out the Xbox Gamerscore and unlocking everything but a handful of costumes, each of which require you to kill wolves by the thousands.

While Iron Snout will never topple my all-time favorite beat ‘em ups, it is a decent entry into the genre, if only for a short stay. Its cartoonish visuals packed to the brim with pork on canine violence will bring out short spurts of glee from any emotionally stunted adult such as me, even if it’s ready for the frying pan after an hour or so.

8 out of 10

Pros

• Absurdly Violent
• Fluid Combat

Cons

• Only Three Arenas
• Miley Cyrus is the Only Celebrity Cameo

Iron Snout was developed by SnoutUp Games and published by Ratalaika Games. It’s available on NS, PC, PS4, PS Vita, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Iron Snout, check out the publisher’s site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

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