Phantom Fury - road movie-inspired full 3D sequel to Ion Fury

[Valestein]

This doesn't look too bad(tho not as good as Ion Fury/Aftershock) going off the gman review, but would wait for a sale and for patching before jumping in.

 

[Echo Mirage]

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

After finishing the whole thing, I can say to anyone curious enough to try it - don't.

- first thing I noticed, is how shooting feels bad. Most of the weapons felt off to me, underwhelming, except Loverboy and shotguns. Enemies feel blocky, unresponsive and it is simply not fun. A basic, most important ingredient in FPS game.
- Weapons - the most basic one we find in the beginning will be the most used (+ bowling bombs for crowd control and microstinger for boss fight).
- enemies are too fast, to compensate the low AI. Hitscanners aren't a big deal, but there are strong melee enemies who rush on you and can kill you in 3 hits. I've cheesed through them with shotgun upgrade to blind them.
- too many zombie like enemies + standard soldiers. Plus later one we've got infinite spawning areas when it comes to zombies.
- invisible walls - because we don't want players to feel any freedom when he is moving through open areas.
- difficulty settings - I've played on normal at first, but changed it to easy. The enemies were killing me so quickly at the early parts of the game, that I capitulated. Whoever was testing it, didn't do a good job. I didn't even try hard mode.
- no manual save. It would help with some of the ambushes and to minimize repeating of some of the longer segments.
- First half of the game is good enough to make you interested. But than vehicle sections start showing up, and it just going downfall. There is barely any story that could keep player interested in anything that is going down. It's like someone wanted to make a mix of Half Life and Sin, and just weren't capable in any means to do this.
- Speaking of Sin - we meet Blade in a short encounter near the end of the game. He gives us his pistol. That concludes his part in PF.
- Nanite upgrades - too many upgrades are put on a rather short playtime. The one for the weapons are of course the most essential.
- Performance was good first, but later on I've got some strange stuttering. In addition I was catapulted through levels while touching some objects. Reminded me of Quake III levels.
- Music - I can't even remember one track from it. It's in the background, trying to add atmosphere to the experience, but it felt too flat for me.

There are too much issues, that patches could fix. It's a messy release, that shouldn't happen, and had at least a year of further development. Go play Ion Fury instead.

 

[Ash]

I don't see what the problem is. Garbage shooting, weak enemy design & variety, railroaded boring realism-oriented level design mixed with pointless empty open areas, lots of hitscan combat, shit-tier vehicle sections, music that's barely present or worth a damn.

This game is the PERFECT representation of those terrible 2000s-era shooters dim gamers love. Excellent job Slipgate Ironworks! Well, just missing the two weapon limit and regen health. Save it for the sequel eh?

 

[orcinator]

Bombshell has got her own Duke Nukem Forever by the looks of it.

It's just returning to the Tradition set by her original game, the shitty top down shooter.

 

[SharkClub]

Civvie is decidedly very soy but his video about 3DR/Slipgate Ironworks is right on the money. These people are completely incompetent. They've had several chances and have yet to produce a single game worth playing. Every FPS game they make is a soulless piece of shit with no feedback or feeling to it. The only thing they can do remotely correct is the art/graphics with games like this and Graven looking quite low-fi stylish, but even then Kingpin Reloaded looks like fucking vomit, ugly AI upscaling and extreme bloom everywhere. The fact that they then have the cheek to start insulting customers and reviewers when they have nothing worthwhile to show after years and years of game development is just ridiculous. They're a "Danish" studio but if you told me they were staffed almost exclusively by pajeets I'd believe you.

3DR should fire all of Slipgate Ironworks and pay Voidpoint to make another game with all the money they were laundering through Slipgate.

 

[orcinator]

3DR should fire all of Slipgate Ironworks and pay Voidpoint to make another game with all the money they were laundering through Slipgate.

They should pay the Overload guys to gather the team back up now that Volition is dead/dying.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

After finishing the whole thing, I can say to anyone curious enough to try it - don't.

Knew it was going to be a shitshow since I played the train demo, with some games you can tell they're going to be an irredeemable piece of shit far away from any release date. It's just a shame that both gamers and youtube reviewers are retarded for the most point and they keep bringing up how Ion Fury was great, made by a totally different developer, with a different engine and totally different goals, and then saying that they expected more from Phantom Fury, as the two were connected other than in name only.

Then you have absolute faggots like GayManShills saying that Aftershock was "outdated", but wasn't that the entire point of bringing back Build Engine supremacy? Ion Fury was a game bringing back the design principles and tech from the 90's and retards claim that the expansion came out too late, was outdated and wasn't a movement shooter.

I was going to take a bullet for team Codex and pirate it, but thanks to you, ND, I can play a good game instead over the weekend, so thank you for your service. People keep mentioning that it is supposedly taking cues from SiN, but could you comment on what is meant by that?

It's like someone wanted to make a mix of Half Life and Sin, and just weren't capable in any means to do this.

SiN is the glorious place spectacle shooters could have gone if not for Half-Life, semi-non-linear levels, where your actions in previous segments or levels impacting what you'll see in the future. A fantastic damage system, that takes into account armor and where you and the enemies get shot. There was also a great deal of mission variety, both in terms what you do, how you do it, and where. Subway tunnels, oil rigs, offices, the streets, secret complexes and biolabs, tropical island mansion, a military base... You'd be stopping a bank robbery in one mission, stopping a nuclear launch in the next, and then swimming into a secret underwater facility in another, only to get turned into a mutant and having to deal with that.

There's a lot in SiN that I haven't seen done before or after, so if it actually does any of that good shit SiN did I might have to play it anyway, but somehow I get the feeling that this isn't what people mean and that they refer to the slightly shitty driving sections or something, because again, SiN was all about variety and spectacle, so they'd let you drive around too at points.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

People keep mentioning that it is supposedly taking cues from SiN, but could you comment on what is meant by that?

It tries to be an action sci-fi spectacle, but it just feels so undercooked and silly in comparison to the original. I haven't tried demo to see how the full game feels, and was hoping that after introducing Blade into the story, they will use more than that. Turns out it was just false advertising and doing a cheap marketing move. Instead of trying to find something good in PF, I recommend trying the demo of "The Last Exterminator" . It actually feels, like it could be a good game, that is looking at Duke Nukem 3D as the inspiration.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Instead of trying to find something good in PF, I recommend trying the demo of "The Last Exterminator" . It actually feels, like it could be a good game, that is looking at Duke Nukem 3D as the inspiration.

I've been meaning to try it out and just from seeing five seconds of gameplay you can tell that it gets much more right than Phantom Fury did at final release. What's kept me from playing it though is that there is this line between taking inspiration from and building on something, and a homage that borders too close on a clone without adding anything to the experience. Every second I spent playing Cultic was a second I spent asking myself why I wasn't replaying Blood instead, and I'm thinking that the same might be the case for TLE but with Duke Nukem 3D.

Gameplay for the convenience of readers:


Ion Fury already had this issue of developing a strong identity of its own, but the enemy design, the weapons, and level design managed to carry it. Shelly is both dressed and built like the character was designed by a puritan transported to the modern day, and her one-liners fall flat, but since you're fighting cyborg ninjas in the sets of Blade Runner recreated in the Build Engine with gunplay and movement that feels just right it's not that big of a deal as it might have been. The Last Exterminator gives us some approximation of the female version of They Live, but Duke Nukem 3D already milked that film to the limit. All that peak 90's edge is seemingly gone too.

But it's not like we're swimming in competently put together singleplayer shooters these days, throwback ones or otherwise, so I'll check the demo out and if it scratches the itch enough I'll get the full game on release.

 

[Fargus]

Civvie is decidedly very soy but his video about 3DR/Slipgate Ironworks is right on the money. These people are completely incompetent. They've had several chances and have yet to produce a single game worth playing. Every FPS game they make is a soulless piece of shit with no feedback or feeling to it. The only thing they can do remotely correct is the art/graphics with games like this and Graven looking quite low-fi stylish, but even then Kingpin Reloaded looks like fucking vomit, ugly AI upscaling and extreme bloom everywhere. The fact that they then have the cheek to start insulting customers and reviewers when they have nothing worthwhile to show after years and years of game development is just ridiculous. They're a "Danish" studio but if you told me they were staffed almost exclusively by pajeets I'd believe you.

3DR should fire all of Slipgate Ironworks and pay Voidpoint to make another game with all the money they were laundering through Slipgate.

3drealms are trashmakers but Slipgate are absolute shit. I don't know how they are still around. If you as a studio can't even remaster a fucking 5 hour game from 1999 in 3 years and dare to release it broken, with questionable features nobody asked for and looking like complete dogshit compared to the original you deserve to be erased from existence.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Update on The Last Exterminator, since I decided to give the demo a spin and it was very short, a far cry from the-first-episode-is-free shareware scene back in the day.

Screenshots and demo impressions

This is bad, if it's being funded by the Australian government then that comes with certain limitations and restrictions antithetical to the spirit of the 90's shooter.

It wants to be Duke Nukem 3D real bad, the main menu, the soundtrack, it's all a faded copy of DN3D. As I predicted it was hitting too close.

The weapons are alright I suppose, but don't follow the theme of being a bug exterminator, you're not gassing Turks, but use your standard pistol and shotgun.

It lays on the references heavy in the demo, so much that the callbacks outnumber the original content. There's a Black Mesa mug, the phonecall from Max Payne's intro, Duke references, Civvie that soyack gives a call from the can...

... and the drink vending machines has lemon-lime and orange mixed up.

The level design is competent though, even if the demo is just the one level.

All secrets found, all enemies killed.

It's hard to communicate just how much of a remember-this factor is at play in the demo without playing it for yourself, but the trailer for the demo does get some of the message across with the theme, visuals and all that.



Since this is funded by the Victoria State Government there are no strippers or pig cops like in DN3D, and the supposed female protagonist looks like a frumpy boy. What's more surprising though is that despite this game being a hodgepodge of references to games that you might remember from the golden era of the genre, it plays much more like a console shooter, with that characteristic floaty movement, an overly large UI, and a certain chunkyness to it. It's not actually bad, the game plays fine, but this is more of a Zortch or Turok or Goldeneye situation than any of the stated inspirations in terms of movement and gunfeel.

I'm starting to think that Ion Fury and its expansion, Aftershock, was the peak of the old school FPS revival and that it's only downhill from here. With all of that said it is day and night compared to Phantom Fury's demo, the textures are nice, level design is fine, and they got the fundamentals down of what makes a shooter at all enjoyable to play. If you removed the asscancer that is Civvie and at least half of the references you might even have a good game buried in there somewhere, and not just a passable shooter. Honestly, at points it feels more like this is a 90's shooter through the lens of youtubers making meme videos about it than something born out of an actual love of the genre. Like were the devs really that big fans of Rise of the Triad to include among the protagonist's bark an "Eat Lead!", or was that because they watched a youtube video of haha soyboy funnyman about RotT?

 

[Kabas]

Wouldn't call Ion Fury the peak of old school FPS revival. It drags on and on during the later half a bit too much for my tastes.

and the supposed female protagonist looks like a frumpy boy

Funny, while playing the demo i assumed that the protagonist was a guy. Didn't learn the truth until much later.

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Wouldn't call Ion Fury the peak of old school FPS revival.

Name the peak then, I'm not asking this for the sake of argument but because I want to play it.

 

[destinae vomitus]

Name the peak then, I'm not asking this for the sake of argument but because I want to play it.

Overload is pretty much the only good one besides Ion Fury by my reckoning, it's Descent in all but name.