Fatal Chaos: The Rabbit's Attack

Fatal Chaos : The Rabbit's Attack is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, based on a Malaysian comic. Whilst it may seem like a weird game to release over here, we found it a surprisingly robust little game, although as we'll see the emphasis is on 'little'.

As with the majority of fighting games, the underlying storyline doesn't matter much. Your character is about to be framed for murder by a bad girl called Nina, who is somehow linked to the Evil Rabbit gang – a group of school children who go around dressed in rabbit costumes, complete with burning red eyes. Thus the action begins.

Played from a side-on perspective but also enabling movement towards and away from the camera, Fatal Chaos will be familiar to anyone who's fought through Double Dragon or Streets of Rage. Playing as either the Austin Powers look-alike Rex or the feisty if disturbingly young Eva, you must punch, kick, throw, and stab your way to victory against the Evil Rabbits.

The most striking thing about Fatal Chaos is its bright and colourful visuals. The characters are stylised, crisp and well animated.

Each character also has a unique move-set. New moves are learned automatically as you progress, ranging from a roundhouse kick and a devastating uppercut to an arm drag.

Your most basic move, a punch, is made by pressing the '5' button, with '1' and '3' making your character do a jumping kick to either the left or right, whilst '4', '6', '8' and '2' control your movement. The range of moves on offer is expanded even more by the ability to pick up weapons that you (rather jarringly) find in crates as you make your way through the levels.

There's also the odd boss-fight to break up the action. These can often prove to be incredibly tricky, unless you've got plenty of lives stocked up, as your opponents have fancier moves than you, and more health, too. As your arsenal of moves improves drastically as you progress through the game, the later are a lot easier to defeat than the earlier ones, however.

Progress is at your own speed; there's no auto-scrolling backgrounds here, instead the game follows you as you move from left to right, taking out the batches of gang members as you find them.

There are, however, several invisible walls to stop you going too far in either direction without defeating the required enemies. The problem with this is the rabbits often have a habit of lurking just off screen, a few millimetres away from your outstretched fist, which can prove to be quite frustrating, especially when you find yourself being smashed over the head with a baseball bat by an unseen attacker.

Throughout, Fatal Chaos is an attractive game. Enemies and backgrounds alike have been rendered to the same high standards as the playable characters – it's just a shame there aren't more of them. Over the six levels you'll fight against a similar looking backdrop (albeit at changing times of day – the sun sets as your progress through the levels), and there's an equal lack of variety in the enemies.

Although you do come up against several different types of 'rabbit', wielding weapons ranging from baseball bats to Molotov cocktails, even the cosmetic differences are minimal, leaving the game looking sort of impressively bland.

The level design is also rather uninspiring, seeing you fight along a flat pathway, straight to the end of the level. Although it does spice up a bit in the later levels – where you have to dodge rolling barrels, Donkey Kong-style – more varied scenery and a bit of jumping earlier on could have really spiced things up.

Fatal Fury is a practically silent game. There are no sound effects, and only a few tunes, each of which lasts for just a few bars, gets repeated twice, and then stops, leaving you playing through the levels in complete silence. If you like a good 'Pow!' or 'Bang!' whilst you kick people dressed in rabbit costumes (and hey, who are we to comment on your interests), you'll be disappointed here.

Also, when playing through the game on our N-Gage, we came across a more serious problem. Occasionally, our character would show a distinct reluctance to move left and right, refusing to budge, at all, even though you're hammering the appropriate button – a problem you could really do without on a side-scrolling beat-'em-up.

The glitch was easily remedied by moving the character in a different direction first, and we didn't suffer it at all on the K750i, but it could be very frustrating.

Overall, Fatal Fury is a surprisingly solid beat-'em-up, and fun while it lasts. The game's addictive mix of weapons and hand-to-hand combat presents many options as to how you play the game, and the two playable characters will give you plenty of replay value.

The biggest drawback is how short it all is. The entire game (once you master the boss fights) can be blasted through in around 20 minutes, and while the playable character's different move sets give the game some replay value, a second go will only be quicker. So whilst the quick level based gameplay is well-suited for a bus or train ride to work, it won't get satisfy you on a flight across Europe, let alone on a long haul to Malaysia.