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.
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.
DasAntihero
9 days ago