Conker's Bad Fur Day Reviews

The game follows Conker, a squirrel with a hangover, just trying to get home while being forced to save the world.

This is a supposedly funny game that struck me as the exact opposite! Of course, I already knew how unashamedly vulgar it was, but I still found it almost universally unamusing.

Right off the bat, the dialogue rubbed me the wrong way. It's impressive that all the voices were done by one man and one woman, but the accents are often inconsistent, so I couldn't tell what accent each character was supposed to have. Doesn't help that their speech is so muttery that it kills any sense of timing.

That's partly why none of the jokes got any rise out of me at all. It wasn't the anger-inducing kind of unfunny: more like a barren, joyless void. I wasn't angry, just reduced to a state of such pure misery that it was like my soul had died. Is this what falling into depression feels like?

There's no wit to the jokes whatsoever; it's like the crudity itself is the joke. Other times, the humour stems from utter nonsense. I mean, what is the logic behind a Terminator haystack?! The few times it breaks the fourth wall come straight out of nowhere and are too incongruous to be funny. And towards the end, the pop culture references are so blatant that they just become maddening.

Conker himself is a slimeball who often cheats and swindles the other characters he meets, then unleashes a monster that brutally butchers them, just to kick them while they're down. That might have been funny under other circumstances, but the game did nothing to hearten me beforehand, so it just came off as mean-spirited, like the game was made by straight-up sadists.

Its absolute nadir is the Big Big Guy – or, as Conker calls it, the big-bollocked boiler. When I saw that, it completely broke me; I had to pause and silently weep for a few minutes.

The only scene I liked (apart from the Clockwork Orange homage in the opening shot) was the Great Mighty Poo. Maybe it's because I knew it was coming because I'd seen it in a Joshscorcher video, but I think that's the only time the game actually did something funny with its vulgarity, namely the boss's excessive confidence in what he is and that he can beat you.

In conclusion, this is, hands down, the worst game I have ever played! It's bad enough that it's on my least favourite console, but its humour depressed me to the point that I felt like I'd never be cheerful again. In my mind, this game is where joy goes to die!

My rating: 25%