When it comes to the current boomer shooter scene, and really any movement that preys on nostalgia, a lot of the projects that come out tend to label themselves as a retro throwback made to emulate the feel of those old games people enjoyed, but oftentimes that is where they stop. Some choose to wear the guise of an older game in order to subvert expectations and do something new, while others settle with simple imitation of the classics; sadly the latter is more common than the former. Games like Prodeus, Warhammer 40k: Boltgun, and Slayers X, while having merit in somethings, ultimately just feel like hollow echoes of their influences. Ion Fury, at first, looks like it is going to be in a similar situation; a game that is trying emulate the likes of the Build Engine trinity, with Shelly Bombshell formerly being a Duke Nukem character, and the fact that the game is actually built in a heavily modified version of the original Build Engine. But, throughout the game's run time, it slowly unveils itself as something more; it is a direct evolution and improvement over its inspirations, it keeps the same feel but without the clunkiness and outdated design tropes.
The importance of the Build Engine games, that being Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior, was their intricacy. The levels that make the worlds that these games take place in had a level of detail and openness that other FPS games just didn’t have; Duke Nukem’s levels were chalked full of air vents that acted as alternate routes and consumable items, like jet packs and steroids, that could lead to complete sequence breaks and level skips if used properly. Blood also had this, but added onto it with much more in depth combat and brutal combat, asking the player not just to aim and shoot, but to actively engage with the 3D environment by using crouch and jump to dodge fire, rather than just finding cover. In a modern context, these innovations aren’t anything unique, they have been integrated into the standards of game design, and as such, are just expected. This is the trapping that the boomer shooters mentioned earlier fall into, they replicate the innovation without improvement, creating a flat circle of design. Ion Fury sets itself apart by going beyond this; it uses the design tropes set up by its forefathers and fully explores them. Levels don’t just have one or two ways to approach, they have a hundred; there could be two different sets of air vents that lead to different positions that flank a group of enemies, there could be an explosive wall that kills the enemies on the other side, there could be a series of banisters or edges that can be jumped across in order to gain the high ground, and so on and so forth. Once the first one of these alternate routes is found, the player's brain starts to seek them out and begins to notice more of them as the game progresses; it keeps the player engaged and gives them a sense of freedom in a linearly structured game. It's not just the physical level geometry that keeps the player engaged, the way the enemies and the player interact also has a level of depth to them not seen in other games. The most blunt example of this is how the robot headcrab enemies overload and explode when hit with the electric baton, offering an ammo free alternative to taking out these smaller enemies. My favorite though is the centipede enemies; these guys break apart into shorter and shorter versions of themselves if you hit their body, but will die in one go if you get a perfect headshot, encouraging the player to slow down for a second so that the encounter won’t get out of hand. Additionally, much like blood before it, the enemies that fire projectiles, particularly the grenade grunts and bow grunts, really keep the player on their toes. If the player just runs around standing straight up like they would in any other game, the will get blown to bits; but, if they utilize the crouch and jump as not just platforming mechanics, but also ways to juke out enemies, these types of enemies become some of the easiest in the game. But, of course, these enemies wouldn’t be nearly as fun to fight if the arsenal of weapons wasn’t up to snuff, and they very much are.
I really appreciate the balancing and utility of the weapons in Ion Fury. Most FPS games that feature weapons with alternate fire mechanics make the mistake of either making the alt fires way too good, to the point that they overshadow the base fire, or they are way too gimmicky and not worth using. Ion Fury strikes the perfect balance between these two sides by having the alt fires be not too drastically different from the base fires, but different enough to where scenarios in which one would be better than the other can be differentiated. The Ion Bow is the weapon that I think first demonstrates this. The single bolt base fire is great for taking out the group of enemies right before the first boss because of how precise it is, giving clean head shots to all the singular enemies in that wave. But, the overload alt fire where it shoots out dozens of groups of bolts in quick succession proves to be extremely useful for both the boss and its accompanying flying drones that move sporadically. My favorite weapon in the game, the bowling bombs, do a similar thing, just on a much more subtle scale. The alt fire acts like a traditional grenade, Shelly lights the wick and lobs it in a general direction, and then it explodes, badabing badaboom, simple and reliant. But the base fire is a bit more tricky; it can either be rolled along the ground immediately to hit long range targets, or held a bit longer to activate a homing feature that can hit enemies from around corners, making it an extremely versatile weapon. The only weapon that doesn’t really fit this mold is the Loverboy, the starting pistol. The Loverboy’s alt fire lets Shelly pull a Clint Eastwood and auto headshot up to three enemies at a time, which is objectively better than its single shot base fire. Although, I think this is fine because it is the starting pistol, and it grants it relevance even into the final level of the game; as well it's not the easiest thing to get the hang of, so there is a bit of a skill gap. All the other weapons are great too, I just don’t really want to mention all of them here. That being said though, there are a couple of gripes I have with Ion Fury, but they are mostly to do with the porting job to the Nintendo Switch.
As mentioned, the version of this game that I played was the port released for the switch back in 2020, this is the version I bought years ago when it first came out, and I didn’t feel like buying it again on Steam or Xbox. This port of the game is pretty good all things considered; the frame rate does dip, and sometimes slows to a crawl, when big explosions happen or lots of enemies are on screen, but these instances are few and far between. My main issues come in the form of accessibility and options, there are very few of them. Firstly, there is no button mapping, just two alternate control methods, which is better than nothing, but these alternate options don’t change the things I wanted. The game has bumper jumper set to the right bumper and makes the player use the D-pad to toggle between weapons. The first of these is an issue because it means the player can not shoot and jump at the same time, which I am used to as a console FPS fan, but it still sucks regardless as it was so close to being functional, it just needed to be moved to the left bumper. The second issue is bad because having weapon selection mapped to the D-pad means that the player can't move and select weapons at the same time, which is a big issue. The game tries to mitigate this by having the shotgun’s grenade alt fire be a shortcut to the other side of the selection wheel, but I would have rather had a proper weapon wheel like in Dusk or Doom Eternal. Additionally, the games draw distance can be a little low, leaving things far off in the distance hard to see, this is only really bad in some of the levels set in the open streets or subway tunnels, otherwise it is not that big of a deal.
Ion Fury stands proud as one of the originators of this boomer shooter phenomena, standing alongside both Dusk and Amid Evil. It is a prime example of how to take what was set up by its influences, and improve upon them in order to unleash the full potential of those ideas. As this new genre continues to grow, and more and more games come out that simply want to be like the classics and nothing more, I hope more games look to what Ion Fury has done, to see how to properly create a meaningful homage to the past.
The importance of the Build Engine games, that being Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior, was their intricacy. The levels that make the worlds that these games take place in had a level of detail and openness that other FPS games just didn’t have; Duke Nukem’s levels were chalked full of air vents that acted as alternate routes and consumable items, like jet packs and steroids, that could lead to complete sequence breaks and level skips if used properly. Blood also had this, but added onto it with much more in depth combat and brutal combat, asking the player not just to aim and shoot, but to actively engage with the 3D environment by using crouch and jump to dodge fire, rather than just finding cover. In a modern context, these innovations aren’t anything unique, they have been integrated into the standards of game design, and as such, are just expected. This is the trapping that the boomer shooters mentioned earlier fall into, they replicate the innovation without improvement, creating a flat circle of design. Ion Fury sets itself apart by going beyond this; it uses the design tropes set up by its forefathers and fully explores them. Levels don’t just have one or two ways to approach, they have a hundred; there could be two different sets of air vents that lead to different positions that flank a group of enemies, there could be an explosive wall that kills the enemies on the other side, there could be a series of banisters or edges that can be jumped across in order to gain the high ground, and so on and so forth. Once the first one of these alternate routes is found, the player's brain starts to seek them out and begins to notice more of them as the game progresses; it keeps the player engaged and gives them a sense of freedom in a linearly structured game. It's not just the physical level geometry that keeps the player engaged, the way the enemies and the player interact also has a level of depth to them not seen in other games. The most blunt example of this is how the robot headcrab enemies overload and explode when hit with the electric baton, offering an ammo free alternative to taking out these smaller enemies. My favorite though is the centipede enemies; these guys break apart into shorter and shorter versions of themselves if you hit their body, but will die in one go if you get a perfect headshot, encouraging the player to slow down for a second so that the encounter won’t get out of hand. Additionally, much like blood before it, the enemies that fire projectiles, particularly the grenade grunts and bow grunts, really keep the player on their toes. If the player just runs around standing straight up like they would in any other game, the will get blown to bits; but, if they utilize the crouch and jump as not just platforming mechanics, but also ways to juke out enemies, these types of enemies become some of the easiest in the game. But, of course, these enemies wouldn’t be nearly as fun to fight if the arsenal of weapons wasn’t up to snuff, and they very much are.
I really appreciate the balancing and utility of the weapons in Ion Fury. Most FPS games that feature weapons with alternate fire mechanics make the mistake of either making the alt fires way too good, to the point that they overshadow the base fire, or they are way too gimmicky and not worth using. Ion Fury strikes the perfect balance between these two sides by having the alt fires be not too drastically different from the base fires, but different enough to where scenarios in which one would be better than the other can be differentiated. The Ion Bow is the weapon that I think first demonstrates this. The single bolt base fire is great for taking out the group of enemies right before the first boss because of how precise it is, giving clean head shots to all the singular enemies in that wave. But, the overload alt fire where it shoots out dozens of groups of bolts in quick succession proves to be extremely useful for both the boss and its accompanying flying drones that move sporadically. My favorite weapon in the game, the bowling bombs, do a similar thing, just on a much more subtle scale. The alt fire acts like a traditional grenade, Shelly lights the wick and lobs it in a general direction, and then it explodes, badabing badaboom, simple and reliant. But the base fire is a bit more tricky; it can either be rolled along the ground immediately to hit long range targets, or held a bit longer to activate a homing feature that can hit enemies from around corners, making it an extremely versatile weapon. The only weapon that doesn’t really fit this mold is the Loverboy, the starting pistol. The Loverboy’s alt fire lets Shelly pull a Clint Eastwood and auto headshot up to three enemies at a time, which is objectively better than its single shot base fire. Although, I think this is fine because it is the starting pistol, and it grants it relevance even into the final level of the game; as well it's not the easiest thing to get the hang of, so there is a bit of a skill gap. All the other weapons are great too, I just don’t really want to mention all of them here. That being said though, there are a couple of gripes I have with Ion Fury, but they are mostly to do with the porting job to the Nintendo Switch.
As mentioned, the version of this game that I played was the port released for the switch back in 2020, this is the version I bought years ago when it first came out, and I didn’t feel like buying it again on Steam or Xbox. This port of the game is pretty good all things considered; the frame rate does dip, and sometimes slows to a crawl, when big explosions happen or lots of enemies are on screen, but these instances are few and far between. My main issues come in the form of accessibility and options, there are very few of them. Firstly, there is no button mapping, just two alternate control methods, which is better than nothing, but these alternate options don’t change the things I wanted. The game has bumper jumper set to the right bumper and makes the player use the D-pad to toggle between weapons. The first of these is an issue because it means the player can not shoot and jump at the same time, which I am used to as a console FPS fan, but it still sucks regardless as it was so close to being functional, it just needed to be moved to the left bumper. The second issue is bad because having weapon selection mapped to the D-pad means that the player can't move and select weapons at the same time, which is a big issue. The game tries to mitigate this by having the shotgun’s grenade alt fire be a shortcut to the other side of the selection wheel, but I would have rather had a proper weapon wheel like in Dusk or Doom Eternal. Additionally, the games draw distance can be a little low, leaving things far off in the distance hard to see, this is only really bad in some of the levels set in the open streets or subway tunnels, otherwise it is not that big of a deal.
Ion Fury stands proud as one of the originators of this boomer shooter phenomena, standing alongside both Dusk and Amid Evil. It is a prime example of how to take what was set up by its influences, and improve upon them in order to unleash the full potential of those ideas. As this new genre continues to grow, and more and more games come out that simply want to be like the classics and nothing more, I hope more games look to what Ion Fury has done, to see how to properly create a meaningful homage to the past.