Overview

Lugaru is a free and open source third-person action game built around martial-arts combat. You play Turner, an anthropomorphic rebel rabbit whose village has been slaughtered; hunting down those responsible leads him into a conspiracy involving the corrupt leaders of the rabbit republic and the starving wolves from a nearby den. Lugaru was originally developed by David Rosen of Wolfire Games, released commercially in 2005, and open sourced in 2010 along with its assets. The code base is now maintained by the community OSS Lugaru team, and the current releases go beyond the old commercial HD build with multiple campaigns, modern resolution support and working modding tools.

Key Features

• Context-sensitive melee combat — punches, kicks, sweeps and reversals chain together, so fights read as an actual martial-arts exchange rather than a button-mash of separate attacks.
• Weapons and stealth — knives, swords and staffs can be picked up and used, and crouching, sneaking and sneak attacks let you take enemies out quietly before they raise the alarm.
• Story campaign — the official Turner campaign is included in full, with the rabbit republic, the wolves and the levels that made the original a cult favourite.
• Multiple campaigns in one build — the free Temple (by Silb), Empire (by Jendraz) and The Seven Tasks (by Philtron R.) campaigns ship with the game and are switchable from the level selection menu, which also makes installing community mods straightforward.
• In-game modding and level tools — the --devtools switch (or Devtools: 1 in config.txt) unlocks the built-in editor and developer tooling for maps, campaigns and player configuration.
• Modern engine plumbing — windowing and input moved from SDL 1.2 to SDL 2, with proper resolution detection, fullscreen plus the Alt+Return hotkey, and a default resolution of 1024×768 instead of the original 640×480.
• Anaglyph stereo 3D — an optional “stereo” display mode for playing with red/cyan 3D glasses.
• Sensible config and save locations — ~/.config/lugaru and ~/.local/share/lugaru on Linux (XDG), ~/Library/Application Support/Lugaru on macOS, %APPDATA%Lugaru on Windows; progress is now saved automatically when a level is completed.
• Cross-platform binaries and packaging — official Linux, macOS and Windows builds (CI-built with GCC/Clang and MinGW32/MinGW64), plus distribution packaging: Debian and Ubuntu ship lugaru and lugaru-data in main.

Why Use It

Lugaru is one of the few genuinely free 3D action games with a complete, hand-authored campaign and a real combat system, and since 2010 both the engine and the original Wolfire assets are licensed so that the whole thing — not just the code — is freely redistributable. The source is GPL-2.0-or-later and the game data is CC-BY-SA, which is why Debian can ship it in main. It is light enough to run on modest hardware, the community build is still actively developed (work on the code base continued through 2026), and the bundled devtools mean you can edit levels and campaigns instead of only playing them. If you want a fast, brutal and thoroughly open alternative to closed-source third-person brawlers, this is the one.

Use Cases

• ⚔️ Playing a complete martial-arts action campaign with a melee system deeper than most commercial brawlers.
• 🥷 Stealth runs — clearing a level with sneak attacks instead of open fights.
• 🛠️ Level and campaign modding with the built-in devtools and the bundled example campaigns.
• 💻 Reviving old or low-spec machines with a native, dependency-light 3D game (SDL2 only).
• 📦 Distributing a fully free game to schools, labs or locked-down machines where commercial games cannot be installed.

Platforms

Linux, macOS and Windows. Prebuilt binaries are published in the repository’s Dist/Linux, Dist/OSX and Dist/Windows directories, and continuous integration builds Linux (GCC and Clang), Windows MinGW32 and MinGW64 targets. Debian and Ubuntu provide the lugaru / lugaru-data packages in main (Debian trixie ships 1.2-7).

Licence

Open source — GNU General Public License v2.0 or later (GPL-2.0-or-later) for the source code. Game assets (models, textures, maps, sounds, animations and campaigns) were relicensed by Wolfire Games’ David Rosen under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike: the original Lugaru/Lugaru HD assets under CC-BY-SA 3.0, and the community OSS Lugaru, Empire and Seven Tasks assets under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Per-asset attribution is listed in CONTENT-LICENSE.txt.

Website

osslugaru.gitlab.io — the open source project site. Source, issues and releases: gitlab.com/osslugaru/lugaru. The original commercial game, including the HD version, is sold by Wolfire Games at wolfire.com/lugaru.

Similar

• Veloren — another free and open source 3D action game with third-person melee combat and a fully open content licence.