Phantom Fury, the review of an ambitious, but full of problems, boomer shooter

Fresh out of a coma, Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison realizes she’s once again up to her neck in trouble. Her victorious fight against Jadus Heskel in Ion Fury did not mark the end of her perils. Unfortunately, ours doesn’t even have time to get all its neurons back into activity that it has to pick up the gun again and go on the massacre again, to defend the Demon Core, a very dangerous artifact with exceptional powers which if it ended up in the wrong hands could mark the end of the human race. Fortunately this time she has a bionic arm on her side that allows her to destroy everything and a brand new arsenal with which to go wild (the Loverboy revolver, her favorite weapon there is her, don’t worry). Will they be enough to save her from her past? Find out in Phantom Fury reviewhis new adventure.

Inception

THE boomer shooters have carved out a large share of the market for themselves in recent years, finding hundreds of thousands of fans eager to relive the first-person shooter genre according to its original methods. Think about the various REKKR, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, DUSK, Ultrakill, Amid Evil and many others to get an idea of ​​what we are talking about. Its signature is the adoption of some forms that are now obsolete in contemporary shooters, such as the abstract and labyrinthine morphology of the levels, the unguided gameplay based on the player’s skill and the very high speed of the action. There is a corollary to everything the programmatic adoption of legacy software technologiesactually filmed or simply imitated with modern graphics engines.

One of the noblest representatives of this lineage of shooters old and new at the same time, essentially founded on the nostalgia of something that no longer exists in the mainstream market, is certainly the aforementioned Ion Fury by Voidpoint which, developed using the Duke Nukem 3D engine , the famous “build”, managed to collect its spiritual legacy, finding enormous consensus in the community.

After all, the protagonist Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison is a character who was born within the Duke series, despite never having appeared in one of its official video games: it was supposed to be part of the cast of Duke Nukem Forever, that of 3D Realms, but it was removed in the final version, which in the meantime ended up in the hands of Gearbox. Surprisingly, a few years later he obtained the leading role in a game of his own (someone in 3D Realms has never forgotten her), the mediocre action Bombshell, and then returned to the genre that was more his own with Ion Fury, of which Phantom Fury is the official sequel, although it was developed by another team, the Slipgate Ironworks specialists, authors of Bombshell. We understand the confusion, but if you want we can even make it worse. The beginning of Phantom Fury, in fact, seems to be Duke Nukem Forever. Not the one developed by Gearbox, but the original one by 3D Realms: some of the levels seem conceptually traced, including bases to escape from, abandoned mines and rooms full of objects to interact with. Of course, then the game progresses in a completely different way, also mentioning other series such as Sin, but the references are many and really evident.

Really the stealth phases?

And they don’t end there, because the main problem of Phantom Fury is half-baked, just like Duke Nukem Forever, that is, it works when it mimics the pure essence of a first-person shooter. When it’s brutal and uncompromising. When it crowds the screen with enemies to be shot down with shotgun or machine gun fire, giving the player moments of pure euphoria, with soldiers exploding in clouds of blood, heads exploding, corpses blowing up in the air and so on. Unfortunately, every time he tries to pretend to be something different he ends up paying dearly for it stealth phases simply make no sense and the enemies themselves who only perform well when they attack en masse and lend themselves to being cannon fodder. But let’s take one of the first stealth phases: we are attacking a military base and we are told that we must not let lights shine on us so as not to set off the alarm.

Now, up until a few seconds before we had been shooting wildly, even throwing bombs, without them having noticed anything in the base, but being able to get through the section without being seen is a real torment, perhaps because the lights some headlights get confused with the map and it is never clear when we are illuminated and when we are not, either because sometimes we have been identified even if we thought we were perfectly hidden, or because the stealth system itself is just sketchy and is not supported in any way from the user interface, in the end, after some unsuccessful attempts, overcome by unspeakable frustration we abdicated and, abandoning all hesitations, we convinced ourselves that it was better to face the reinforcements than to break our spirits in an attempt to do what he asked of us the game. The result? No real penalty, apart from a few extra heads to blow… what’s the point of making us suffer? After all the artificial intelligence of the enemies is not exactly brilliant.

In part it is normal for this to be the case, given that sometimes you have to face dozens of them at the same time, but for the larger creatures it was possible to develop attack patterns that were a little more dynamic, so to speak, and perhaps it was possible to avoid humans who appear completely fools or colossal mechs that get stuck in objects on the ground (it doesn’t happen often, but it happens). We repeat: it may be okay given that it is not the single enemy that makes the difference, but some refinements would still have been appreciated and are especially noticeable because it is the entire game that appears not very clean. We’ll talk again.

A solid shooter

Despite these problems, which unfortunately are not secondary, Phantom Fury is a classic first-person shooter that works hard to live up to expectations, with design choices that almost all look towards the past. For example, we are given goals without being told where to go and what to do. Do you need a specific key to open a certain door? So to find it you have to start searching the map inch by inch (don’t worry, they’re not very big). Do you need a numeric code to call a missile strike or unlock a passage? Go look for the terminal that contains it and then manually insert it where required. You will have realized that there is nothing very complicated, even if you can spend a lot of time on some puzzles. Furthermore, the sense of programmed bewilderment is favored by the design of the levels itself, which requires a certain spirit of observation to advance and which in itself rewards exploration, making you find precious objects, such as the units used to upgrade weapons and skills, in the places more unthinkable. The idea is to replicate the cornerstones of the genre, so you have to find the path yourself even if it means spending more than a few minutes looking around and trying the most absurd solutions. If you don’t like the idea… you obviously don’t like boomer shooters.

Variety and cleanliness

In terms of variety Phantom Fury does very well, but sometimes you wish it didn’t. We have already talked about the stealth phases, but there are also mediocre sections on board vehicles, such as jeeps or helicopters, which add nothing to the experience other than a bit of frustration and involuntary comedy (have you ever seen a helicopter that bounces on rocky walls like a pinball?) The idea we got is that Slipgate Ironworks tried to make a sort of super boomer shooter, putting in as much stuff as possible, but without having the resources necessary to take care of everything. This choice, purely quantitative, partly also tarnishes the good that actually exists. As mentioned, shooting is fun, which is no small plus for an FPS. The weapons are plentiful and satisfying, with some of the purchasable upgrades being truly spectacular.

The enemies die in a fairly bloody way, there are some moments that give pure adrenaline and, in general, the idea of ​​being a female Duke Nukem capable of killing dozens of people by making salacious jokes, and then drinking a beer in peace and burping loudly is done very well, also thanks to a truly complete arsenal and the tasty way in which the bionic arm is used. Even visually, Phantom Fury was created with great care, between grainy textures, angular 3D models and a general attention to the truly high interactivity of the objects in the scenario, between drinks to drink, coin ops and pinball machines to play with and televisions to make burst. Unfortunately it is not very clean, given that quite serious bugs are encountered quite frequently. In particular we suffered a problem relating to the physics of some objects which, when stepped on, throw Shelly away, causing her to end up in the most absurd places. They are common objects, such as platforms or buckets, which we don’t even notice but which have sometimes proven to be more lethal than enemies.

Another really annoying bug we encountered literally blocked us for minutes: an entry simply didn’t appear on a terminal that was used to descend a ladder. Enlightened by the experience, we reloaded a previous save and managed to pass, but we still had a bit of trouble searching for some secret passage or objects that we hadn’t considered. By doing some research we discovered that we are not the only ones who have encountered similar problems. The hope is that everything will be fixed with patches, but knowing the precedents of Slipgate it is not a given that this will happen.

Conclusions

Phantom Fury isn’t a bad game, but it’s just forgettable. It claims to be a luxury boomer shooter, but it fails in comparison with other titles of the genre, which appear more successful overall, including its own predecessor, Ion Fury, which is superior to it in every aspect. Perhaps it would have been better to focus more on the main elements of the experience, namely shooting and exploring, avoiding all those deviations that make it appear like a clumsy attempt to become something that in fact it is not. There really is better out there.