Lugaru

Most of Lugaru's gameplay consists of Hand-to-hand combat with a heavy emphasis on Martial arts, and in many cases the combat incorporates knives, swords, and bo staves. The player can perform disarms, reversals, and counter-reversals. Despite the focus on melee combat, the player is not limited to outright attacking their enemies, since Lugaru has pronounced elements of stealth gameplay, and actively rewards players for defeating foes while remaining undetected.

Lugaru's combat controls are entirely original. There are only three context-sensitive action buttons: one attack button, a jump button, and a more general crouch-reverse button. This setup puts special emphasis on the timing and positioning of attacks to maximize their effectiveness, rather than memorizing complicated key combinations to do more damage.

The story takes place on the island of Lugaru, an unknown number of years after the fall of the human race; all of the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The story focuses on Turner, a mildly famous retired warrior rabbit who lives in a small village with his family and friends.

Unbeknownst to Turner, a pack of wolves from a nearby island had killed and eaten all of the prey that lived there, and came to Lugaru to find more food. Not wanting to make the same mistakes as before, they plan to conserve their food supply by enslaving and farming the citizens of the local rabbit kingdom rather than hunting their new food supply to extinction. Afraid for his life, the rabbit king Hickory agreed to this takeover, provided that the wolves do not harm him. To secure the deal, he sent Jack, one of his most loyal servants, to kill the local raiders, since they would be the only real resistance the wolves would encounter.

Lugaru was made almost solely by David Rosen, including the game engine, models, animations and story. It was one of the first independently produced video games to employ ragdoll physics. It uses a unique combat system that bases attacks and counters on timing and context rather than different key combinations.

Originally released January 28, 2005 for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux

Game designer Jacob Driscoll reviewed Lugaru in his web series, Game Design by Jacob Driscoll.

It's a good sign that the minor flaws I'm seeing are mostly a situation of wanting to see more. I want more contextual fighting moves, more world exploration, better use of the variety of weapons, armor, and enemy strategies (I could've used more stealth, or more situations where enemies alerted their allies, or more verticality to the stages). Brawlers are quite different from my normal fare, and I would've appreciated a little more involved strategy – I feel like a few of my victories were more based on getting off lucky Leg Cannon attacks than on any real meaningful choices – but honestly the game was short enough and combat was fun enough that the run-block-kick-run-LEG CANNON cycle I found myself using didn't get that old. The thing felt really cohesively done.