Although Acclaim is touting Viggo's Revenge as a sequel to last year's hit on the Sega Dreamcast, what you get is essentially the same experience with a few noticeable enhancements. The story begins years in the past, when the Fur Fighters, an elite squad of highly trained Special Force cuddly animals, brought the Evil General Viggo to justice. Viggo, a giant, evil white cat with global domination on his mind, was sent to jail for his crimes. With their greatest foe behind bars the Fur Fighters retired to a peaceful seaside village and put their battling days behind them. Now General Viggo has returned and once again is planning conquest. In order to keep the Fur Fighters at bay, Viggo has ordered his army of idiotic bears to kidnap the hero's families. It is up to you as you will play as Roofus, Juliette, Bungalow, Rico, Chang and Tweek in a coordinated effort to save their families and defeat General Viggo for once and for all.

Graphics
Bizarre Creations were essentially the first developers to market a cel-shaded game with the original Fur Fighters last year. Since that release a number of developers and publishers have found that the cartoonish technique can work quite well on next generation machines. If E3 2001 was any indication, the gaming public can expect many cel-shaded titles on all consoles over the next two years.
In this outing, Bizarre Creations have done a wonderful rebuild of last year's engine. The cel-shaded overhaul given to the characters and environments is extremely detailed and brightly colored. Now the game looks as close to a cartoon experience as ever witnessed in any console game. Bizarre Creations has also utilized some of the PS2's lighting effects to portray the various weapons used throughout the journey. The game maintains a pretty good frames per second refresh rate with only occasional slowdown when many things are happening at once. In the multiplayer modes, the detail drops a bit but has been sacrificed in order to keep frame rates consistent.

Sound
Perhaps one of the biggest improvements over the Dreamcast version was the decision to go out and hire some really good voice acting talent. The characters are now brought to cartoon life and in many cases are quite believable while being humorous. The game's soundtrack is pretty generic for a third person shooter. Care has been taken with the sound effects and they fit nicely in the overall scheme of things.

Gameplay
The gameplay experience is a mixed bag affair. Depending upon how you like to control third person shooters, the mechanics here can be downright frustrating to surprisingly pleasant. The default setting has players utilizing the four main buttons in order to walk forward, backward and strafe left and right. Use the analog sticks to look around while the digital pad serves as weapons control. The shoulder buttons are used for jumping, firing, strafing right and left. Although you can change the configuration around, the bottom line is it will take some time getting used to. Time that some gamers will not have.
The majority of the play time has you running around as each of the six main characters. The ability to change into another character happens frequently thanks to Teleporters spread throughout each level. It takes some thinking on your part to figure out obstacles and which character would be best suited to clear a particular area. Using an array of new weapons, you must search and rescue the kidnapped babies and family members. Unfortunately, family in order to save family members you will have to defeat them as sub-bosses and bosses due to Viggo's decision to make them evil.
The main problem with the gameplay lies in the sheer number of babies that you must find. It becomes quite tedious when you just can not find that missing one or two and you have over 30 levels to play through. The supposedly improved AI still appears a quite flat in places where enemies bare little intelligence at all.

Value
With more than 30 levels set in six progressively tougher worlds, Viggo's Revenge offers a pretty hefty one-player experience. The question is will players continue to trudge through the later more difficult stages and tasks or will they retire for something else. There are also over 25 types of characters to interact with throughout the journey. Building upon last year's iteration, the game offers 20 bizarre weapons, all new enemies and additional power-ups.
The game also offers a Fluffmatch. This is a head-to-head multiplayer match against up to four of your friends. You have twelve unique combat arenas in which to put down your enemies. While at times interactive, we found ourselves wandering around these huge levels most of the time trying to find each other. Not exactly a key element in a successful multiplayer experience.

Final Word
Fur Fighters: Viggo's Revenge is not a bad game but it just reminds me too much of the Dreamcast version. Thus, little innovation can be seen here. Regardless, you do owe yourself to check this game out. The humor is top notch and should provide more than a few laughs.