As someone who enjoyed Ion Fury and Ion Fury: Aftershock, I was really excited at the reveal of Phantom Fury. It captures the visuals of a late 90s/early 2000s FPS. Regardless of what I have to say about it later, it absolutely nailed its graphical style.

I played the Phantom Fury demo in anticipation and in the nicest way possible, I would be fucking embarrassed if I was the one to release a demo in that state. I was hoping that they would delay the game to iron out its glaring issues and a lot of people felt the same way, then they announced that the game would be released 6 months later. From there I went in with very low expectations.

Phantom Fury is a skinwalker taking the identity of Half-Life 1 and 2 alongside the early builds of Duke Nukem Forever. With its nostalgic visuals, it hides such a blatantly unfinished, buggy and half-assed game inside that's trying to lure you in based on its looks, vibes and its John Blade cameo, because kids these days totally know what SiN is and who this John Blade guy is when he only appears for 30 seconds. While I don't agree with people calling Phantom Fury the new generation Blood 2 (because I would gladly replay this over Blood 2 any day of the week), if people are making those comparisons, you've seriously fucked up.

Phantom Fury wants to be Half-life 1 and 2 so badly, its got all the set pieces like a jeep section, except the jeep is a Halo Warthog that controls like a drunken ice skater, with instances of cars shooting at you with rockets like in the Water Hazard chapter. Its got helicopter fights like in Surface Tension, except they don't work here because the AI is beyond stupid. You can replicate Half-Life's set pieces all you like, it's not a substitute for good level design. It's like the game is jangling keys at you trying to jog your nostalgia for a much better game while you play this slog. The levels range from desert region to tech-base and that's all there is to it. I get that the game is trying to invoke that feeling again, but it's 2024, we don't need all these physics-based puzzles in here like the technology for that stuff hasn't been around for 20 years. The level structure constantly goes through an identity crisis. Phantom Fury can't decide whether it wants to be a linear narrative experience, or a classic key hunt with excessive backtracking through the same looking hallways that you will get lost in because there is no sense of direction. Maybe instead of adding in all those quirky environmental interactions so you hopefully tug at people's nostalgia, you instead devoted that time into some better level design.

Onto the combat, it's so weightless like in the demo. Yeah they added in proper gibbing but nothing packs a punch, the automatic weapons feel like staplers and the shotguns feel like a gentle sneeze. The bowling bombs are so unreliable and bounced off enemies most of the time that I ended up never using them towards the end, the Motherflakker reloads too slowly for it to be useful as a crowd clearing weapon, the Ion Bow feels like a shell of its former self and instead of its very useful alt-fire, RMB is now for aiming down the sights like in Half-Life because why? Once again the Loverboy got the most use out of me, even if its lock on alt-fire feels slower, less snappy and has this annoying bug where it can lock on to props such as laptops. Seriously, how does this shit even make it into the final product? You can buy weapon mods for some of your guns. Yes, only a few weapons have purchasable mods. It's like they never finished the full weapon mod line-up. The weapons that do get mods though either have two or only one and it just feels unfinished. Am I supposed to believe that the standard shotgun was only gonna come with ONE weapon mod whereas that foam gun I never used came with two, and the fucking Ion Bow gets NO mods?

Enemies barely flinch or react to getting shot and when they die, they just ragdoll awkwardly. I'm not talking Painkiller ragdolls where enemies are sent flying across arenas in a satisfying way, I'm talking Source engine ragdolls that collapse onto themselves when you unfreeze them with the physics gun in Gmod. Enemies are on the spongey side and the game's way of making them difficult is to just send 20 of them bunched up in your direction, tanking your frame rate in the process. It also doesn't help that the AI is dumb as shit. Sometimes they take cover in the open, most of the time they get stuck on level geometry, and a frighteningly common occurrence were enemies just stand around doing nothing as if I'm not even there. I played this game on Hard and it felt so inconsistent. Sometimes the game would just freely give you health, armour and ammo for an hour for really basic fights, then it'll pull some insane resource conservation shit onto you during the tougher fights.

The story is laughably bad. Why is Shelly siding with the GDF again? They're acting like nothing happened in Aftershock. The Colonel just becomes a twist villain as he betrays you out of nowhere and after killing him, you have to fight ANOTHER FUCKING TWIST VILLAIN that comes way out of left-field and makes no sense. The game tries really hard to make you feel bad for Shelly, but it doesn't work when you hamfist her "tragic" past and trauma to the player and then she gets over it in a single anti-climatic cutscene.

I can't believe I paid $32 fucking Australian dollars for this unfocused, undercooked mess. I fucking gave Slipgate Ironworks and modern day 3D Realms my hard-earned money for this shit. I got Wrath: Aeon of Ruin and Graven from a cheap bundle and finished their early access campaigns ages ago and I'm terrified on what those games have become on their full releases when I eventually replay them.

I do not recommend Phantom Fury and to 3D Realms/Slipgate Ironworks, you guys gotta pull your shit together, because acting all pissy and childish towards reviewers in private who rightfully criticised your unfinished product that you gave out early copies for is not gonna fix this. Don't bite the hands that feed you.

That is a tough one, for sure. Clocking just under 8 hours, you can see the potential of a great game, but there are many problems. "Phantom Fury" is clearly unpolished; it's a hitscan galore with dumb AI (to the game's defense, recent shooters pretty much all have that problem) and music so in the background and bland that I can't remember a single track even after just finishing the game. The story is so simple I could summarize it in a few sentences.

One thing I must give the game credit for, is the level variety and its pixel graphics, which are top of the line (though performance is really lacking). But even after all that, I had fun "some/most" of the time. It could be because there are so few games like this anymore and I was just craving a half-like. I'll admit it might just be a 2.5, but I'll push it to a 3... I really hope Slipgate Ironworks where pushed by Embracer Group to release their games unfinished and now that they are no longer under their control, they can release games to their full potential.

Ever since Phantom Fury was announced, I was very excited. I really like the overall look of the game. It's a sort of modern version of the graphics from the year 2000, and the artists have done a good job of creating a visually appealing title.

However, the game itself is sadly very disappointing. It feels like an aimless project that isn't sure what it wants to be. It's like Ion Fury, but without the fun and violent action nor the clever level design. It's very inspired by Half-Life 1 and 2, but without the well crafted narrative structure that makes the adventure engaging. It's like DNF 2001, but without the charm or the humor. It's even a tiny bit like Deus Ex, but without the complex mechanics and systems that make immsim so interesting to explore.

Combat is at best dull, at worst frustrating, especially because of the bullet spongy enemies and the lack of quick saves which sometimes forces you to replay a 5 minutes sequence all over again.
Enemies' AI is shockingly stupid, even for a small indie title. They often get stuck and stop attacking the player.

The developers had fun implementing numerous interactions with the environment. At first, this seems cool, but it quickly ends up feeling pointless and superficial. There's no gameplay purpose, and it's also inconsistent since some buttons can be pressed or objects picked up, but many others are purely decorative. Honestly they should have used the time spent making those interactions to improve the core gameplay instead.

Phantom Fury is a very unfocused game. It is ambitious and tries to do a lot of things (there are even some completely unnecessary vehicle sequences, or HL2-styled physics-based puzzles that seem to be there just for the sake of it), but everything feels half-baked, from the gameplay to the story (what story?). There are also a lot of bugs, such as scripts that don't execute properly and force us to reload the previous checkpoint. The bugs can be fixed, but I don't think the adventure will improve with a few patches.

While the beginning was alright, the further you go into the game, the more you start to realize how unfinished this game is - with developers breaking even most basic game design ideas for seemingly no reason - like for example, if you miss a rocket launcher in one of the levels, you will be given ammunition for it all the time later in the game, but you'll never find the weapon itself ever again aside from that ONE SINGLE point in the game. Or for example making sure, when - if you've just completed a driving section and now you are in a smaller section where you have to finds elements to progress, to lock the player into the area in order to not make him drive for like 5 min to the beginning of the level. Then of course you have bugs, story that goes nowhere and generally you ever forget exists until some cutscene happens after like 2 or 3 levels. This would be a mediocre shooter with a cool aesthetic - but Slipgate yet again managed to mess it up.

Where do I even start. Do I talk about how Ion Fury is my single favorite indie fps ever made and a near-perfect experience? Do I talk about the Half-Life series, and how it single-handedly kickstarted my love for FPS games, and how the first one is still my favorite overall game ever all these years later? I don't know. Let's just get this over with.

Phantom Fury is not good. It's a buggy, subpar, amateur, unfinished, unfocused mess of a game that clearly needed another year or two to fix all it's problems, and I truly believe that no amount of patches will fix the underlying design issues. It's not the worst indie FPS I've played, nor do I think it is on par with retail DNF or Blood 2, but some of the comparisons are valid in some aspects.

For starters, I want to emphasize: I did not pay for this game because I refuse to support people who both publicly and privately shit on reviewers that THEY THEMSELVES gave out codes for just because they didn't exactly have nice things to say. Not even full on malicious takedowns of the game mind you, just saying they didn't like it and giving constructive criticism about it. But this is a whole another topic entirely.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first: Phantom Fury's inspirations are obvious if you've seen that reveal trailer from 2 years back-- mixing together the pre-existing success of Voidpoint's Ion Fury (which to remind you, that team had NOTHING to do with this game), and blending it together with the linear narrative structure seen in games like Half-Life, and more specifically, the early 2000s-era builds of Duke Nukem Forever.

This is NOT a Half-Life game, nor is it anything CLOSE to the older DNF builds. It tries to be, but it's attempts after the first few levels come down to just reminding you of those games and how you could be playing them instead. Half-Life's level design was incredibly linear, with minimal backtracking save for a few chapters (such as HL1's Blast Pit), usually with a clear objective set by the game and you going from point A to B to C. The level design in Phantom Fury instead mostly comprises of standard, labyrinthian keyhunts you'd see in other more DOOM-inspired games, with little to no signposting to speak of save for an objective list. There was one point where I genuinely got lost for 30 minutes because a fucking ladder blended into the environment and I didn't know I had to go back to where I just was AT THE START OF A LEVEL. It's just so bad.

Let's continue with what to most will be a nitpick, but matters a lot when talking about Half-Life inspired games. What immediately comes to mind when you think of HL's presentation and design? An unbroken first-person narrative, with each area seamlessly transitioning to the next. The game does do this during some of the first few levels, but the illusion is immediately broken by forcing a fade to black and a loading screen with just the game's title art. Half-life's loading screens simply just froze on the last thing you saw as you loaded to the next level, making for only a small break and not taking you out of the setting. And even aside from this, the game just stops trying with seamlessly connecting the levels after the halfway point, simply just teleporting you from one area to the next.

Going back to level design, the layouts are painfully boring, and the location variety is nothing you've seen before in other games. I find it so funny how this game is described by 3DR as a "road trip" game, but really thinking about it, how many places did we go in total? 14 of this game's 18 levels take place in either a desert-like location, or a secret lab of some kind. It's only for the game's final two levels that the variety changes, but even with that, Chicago feels nothing more but a bootleg gm_bigcity but with random enemies placed all over the place. You're mostly stuck to the road with being unable to go inside a lot of buildings, and almost no verticality to speak of. And even with that, most of this game's levels just love to replicate HL1/2's big setpieces except done worse in every way. Remember the helicopter fight in surface tension on the cliffside? Here it is again with basically no level design difference! Remember Water Hazard's chase sequence with all the parked combine cars shooting at you? Here it is again except with a bootleg Halo warthog that controls horribly and no risk of death in an already braindead game! Remember HL2's final few chapters as you storm City 17, with Dr. Breen on the TVs in the background scolding you? Here it is again, except in Chicago with worse level and combat design and no AI squadmates!

Combat and enemy encounter design is an actual joke. 90% of the combat encounters in this game boil down to "here's 20 of the same enemies, have fun!" There is no variation here whatsoever, not helped by the AI being dumb as a sack of bricks. This game loves to throw the zombie enemies at you in large groups and they get so tiring to fight fast, and heavier enemies in groups are just pure bullshit. I played on normal difficulty and this game could not find a medium between purely braindead and pure bullshit. This in particular is where I feel some of the B2 comparison is justified, since it's clear this game wants to be as hard as Ion Fury, yet doesn't understand just why that game was still fair in the first place, and by extension, WHY Half-Life's combat was also challenging yet fair. The EDF soldier AI in the DNF 2001 leak is more intelligent and fun to fight, and it wasn't even for a game that was considered finished, for christ's sake. On top of this, no quicksaves. Only checkpoints. This wouldn't be an issue if this was like a modern DOOM game where it made a checkpoint before and after every enemy encounter, but this game does it whenever the hell it feels like it. I've had to replay 10+ minute sections because I died to one bullshit enemy shot and because the game is so fucking stingy with health pickups and how much they actually give you for the first 2/3rds. How the hell hasn't this company learned since the release of ROTT 2013 to put quicksaves in your retro shooters?

If you think anything in this game is new or would expand upon what we saw in that iconic DNF 2001 trailer, just don't. Aside from a bar level obviously alluding to the Slick Willy and a shield powerup that mechanically isn't different from the riot shield we saw in that trailer, there is nothing new here. It really makes me wonder just how much was even pulled from those old builds. WAS there anything new to pull from? The 01 build had better versions that exist out there that 3DR had ownership to, did they have to cut it out?

The weapons do feel better from the demo, but they still don't feel good at all and don't hold a candle to either DNF01, HL or IF's loadout in terms of raw satisfaction. They honestly feel artificially tweaked, since the only real difference I feel now is that the enemies are more prone to gibbing. Seriously, I'll shoot a guy in the head with the shitty BASE PISTOL, and somehow their leg will come off as well alongside exploding their head. The bowling bombs were done so dirty here. What was once a satisfying addition to build engine explosive weapons is now a frustratingly inconsistent thing that cannot snap onto enemies for the life of them. The Ion Bow is... fine, but it feels signifigantly nerfed from how it was in IF since the charged autofire now has a slower fire rate and now the triple-shot alt fire is replaced with... aiming down sights for some reason. Why? I feel like the loverboy had an alright transition, and the motherflakker is probably the most satisfying weapon period in this game, but that's about it. Everything else just feels bad.

The weapon mods you can find through upgrades are just plain useless for the most part. There's a couple of useful ones like the dual welding for the smgs but the rest either wern't fun to use or gave the weapon obvious downsides (Why do BOTH bowling bomb mods REMOVE the tracking???). I didn't even bother with half of them after a certain point since it was clear most of the actually valuable upgrades were for the arm and suit. On top of this, after the halfway point of the game new weapons you get just don't get mods. At all. Even the selection you have in the game as-is feels pitiful, since some guns only have one mod upgrade for them. This is another thing that just SCREAMS "unfinished and rushed out the door".

The story just makes no sense. Ignoring the fact that this supposedly takes place after Aftershock and Shelly is just fine working with the GDF again after they actively funded Heskel's experiments and hunted her down, this game just tries too hard with trying to make me care. IF didn't need a complicated story other then "stop Heskel", and neither was DNF01 if the leak was anything to go by. The deepest it got was the president having issues with how Duke handled the aliens but that was that. Even with that, literally WHAT was the motivation bootleg general graves had for turning on Shelly? Turning people into cyborgs like Heskel? That'd sure be cool IF WE COULD SEE THAT. And if that wasn't enough, this game has the BALLS to throw in ANOTHER TWIST VILLAIN AT IN THE LAST 5 MINUTES FOR THE SAKE OF ONE FINAL BOSS. Christ, and I thought Wrath's twist was hastily revealed and unnecessary. And it's done so stupidly too, seriously, the exact MOMENT mission control lady started babbling on about how Heskel could've saved the world Shelly should've just shot her on the spot. This game has a large emphasis on melodrama period and it's so fucking cringe. Shelly's entire trauma is that she couldn't defuse one bomb but at the end she IS able to defuse it! Just none of this was needed.

This game has no personality period. Unlike IF where it clearly had attitude from the start and actually had some good laughs here and there, this game doesn't even TRY with that. There's no cool locations or memorable lines at all, it's just a slog the whole way through. Shelly's voice actress sounds like she's just phoning it in here, which is insane to me since she was GREAT in aftershock. There's no punch or snarkiness to her voice, she just sounds done with everyone. The only thing I found funny aside from the occasional bugs was a billboard in the Chicago level reading "A vote for Sneed is a vote against Chuck" and that's just because I think sneedposting is still funny. There's nothing else outside of that, or any clever satirical bits like what we saw in the gun shop in Aftershock's Five finger discount level.

I could go on but honestly I'm getting bored just thinking about this game further. I'd say wait for a heavy discount, but just... no, don't even bother. You're not missing out if you skip this, and there's plenty of experiences for either less or the same amount as this game that are more worth your time.

Do you want to see what DNF01 could've been like? Play the restoration project. It's just one chapter, but it's a hell of a lot more enjoyable then this alongside being free.

Do you want a Half-Life campaign that FEELS like a continuation of the games on top of expanding on the gameplay and universe of HL2? Play Entropy Zero 2. It's absolutely free and is made by people who actually understand Half-Life's design philosophy.

Do you want a fun yet challenging retro shooter? Play Ion Fury. It's the exact same price as Phantom Fury yet is a much better experience and feels fresh the whole way through. Even for 10 bucks more the Aftershock bundle is well worth the money.

And yknow, some might look at this game, without looking at all the other shady dev and pr comments, saying "well, it's not THAT bad!", and yknow what, it is playable. But it isn't fun. Playable should be the minimum expected here, and everything I listed above is an experience more worth your time and money.

I am just done with 3DR after this. Unless it's for something like Cultic I'm not bothering with anything Slipgate Ironworks has involvement with. Never again.

At least Core Decay is safe I think.