Phantom Fury is the direct sequel to VoidPoints Ion Fury. This time, Slipgate Ironworks has taken over development duties for the further adventures of Shelley “Bombshell” Harrison in this retro-inspired boomer shooter. Shelley “Bombshell” Harrison hasn’t been having a good day. Woken up from a coma with a new bionic arm, she’s barely given time to acclimatise to what’s going on around her before the facility she is in, is attacked.
A new mission from her old friend, has our newly awakened heroine gunning and punching for her life across the good old post-apocalyptic U.S. of A. With an expanding arsenal, an arm that can be upgraded and a whole boatload of soldiers and mutants after her blood, Shelley may wish she’d just stayed asleep.
Now while retro-inspired shooters aren’t new to the market, what is new is developing them on older engines rather than our modern, shiny behemoths. Wrath: Aeon of Ruin was built on a modified Quake 1 engine while Iron Fury was built on the Build Engine, which powered such classics as Duke Nukem 3D. If you’re looking to emulate the games of yore, why not also build them on the technology of yesterday and present all that edgy geometry and pixelated textures through authentic software?
To this end, Phantom Fury excels, showcasing design and visuals that look like it just stepped out of 1990. Both the environment and character designs are blocky and edgy while textures look pixelated with edgy black lines. The visual design is never messy though and there’s just enough detail in the environments, and objects to interact with to keep the world from feeling static.
Personally I love the blocky visual design that comes from working in older BSP and sector-based engines. And Phantom Fury has this down pat. Sure you can replicate that in modern engines, but it doesn’t quite have the same feel to it as games made in older engines.
Phantom Fury’s combat is also par for the era. It’s a fast-paced game that keeps you on your toes through encounters. Enemies may not be particularly intelligent, but they’re competent enough to put you into the ground early. After the initial opening, the small-scale encounters explode into larger ones, sometimes with multiple factions fighting each other and you. Phantom Fury doesn’t want you to stand still. That’s a death sentence. Instead, it’s designed to keep you on the move through every encounter, making use of your ever-expanding arsenal.
Shelley’s repertoire of moves is also par for the course. You can run, sprint, slide while sprinting and circle strafe with the best of them. The arsenal of weapons at your disposal is of the usual variety, but there’s an upgrade system at play that lets you mod the weapons. Each weapon has its own upgrade, such as incendiary rounds or cryogenic grenades, to mix combat up with.
Shelley’s other ace up the sleeve, so to speak, is her bionic arm. With it, you can punch through rubble, grates and enemies with ease. There’s a short recharge time attached to it but one punch gibs just about anything. The arm as well can be upgraded to be stronger, have a faster recharge time and throw up a shield, amongst others. It doesn’t drastically alter gameplay but is a great addition in later fire-fights when you’re trying to weave between covers.
Despite these additions, Phantom Fury’s combat can feel a little on the flat side at times. There are some inspired moments, such as a fight against a gunship and a fun train level, but the game’s rudimentary A.I. keeps the combat from entirely exploding out the way that I was hoping it would.
Unlike most Boomer shooters, Phantom Fury is a bit more story-focused, with level design and story beats that take you between locations in a more comprehensive flow. Don’t expect anything ground-breaking in getting you from A to B or character progression, but there’s a bit more to this than the usual aliens blew up my ride bit.
As such, Phantom Fury feels a lot more like Half-Life and Perfect Dark than it does, say, DOOM. There’s some Duke Nukem 3D in there as well, but the Half-Life essence permeates most of the game.
While Phantom Fury is a fun ride, it’s also a little on the unremarkable side. That’s not to say it isn’t a bad game, because it isn’t, but there’s a little spice missing from the ingredients to make it great and some bugs that hamper the fun, such as the game crashing to the dashboard and interacting with environmental objects been finicky.
The visual and level design is great and I appreciated the bones of a story tying it all together, but Phantom Fury just misses the mark of greatness with combat that, while fast, felt a little flat.
Phantom Fury Trailer
Read more of our reviews here https://invisioncommunity.co.uk/category/review/
You must be logged in to post a comment.