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amazon Ion Fury reviews
Ion Fury – To this day, the existence of Ion Fury is probably still a big question mark for the company that owns 3D Realms.
Shelly character model “Bombshell” Harrison was created as the “female version of Duke Nukem” should have featured in a new Duke Nukem game.
But all of the 3D Realms’ plans collapsed when the company underwent major internal reconstruction in the late 2000s, as the Duke Nukem Forever project was “conceived” for an unacceptably long time, making let it be delivered into the hands of Gearbox Software and… you probably already know the rest.
Two big things happened to 3D Realms after the defeat of Duke Nukem Forever (which they were inherently unrelated to).
In 2010, an independent game development team based in Henning, Denmark called Interceptor Entertainment revealed the Duke Nukem 3D: Reloaded project – a remake of the classic game of the same name.
Of course, this was an unorthodox “fanmade” project and it was quickly asked to cancel by Gearbox Software.
However, it helped Interceptor catch the eye of Apogee Software, and the studio bid on a good Rise of the Triad remake in 2013.
In 2014, Interceptor Entertainment announced that the company is working on the next big 3D Realms game called “Bombshell” – a top-down shooter game with the participation of the lovely “Dukette”, which has been lost forgot since 1996.
More notably, the Deluxe version of Bombshell also comes with a beta for Bomshell’s pre-release FPS game built on the Build engine – indeed this is a “dream” offer for any fan from Duke Nukem.
Result?
The bombshell comes out and … is a total failure.
It’s pretty bad in terms of gameplay, it’s too buggy, its price is quite expensive compared to the amount of content it offers, and so far Bombshell is still sitting at a red 43/100 on Metacritic.
Surely 3D Realms did not think his “comeback” was even worse than the failure of Duke Nukem Forever …
But wait, they still have another savior, Ion Maiden – this pre-release game, which is backed by a group of veteran modders, suddenly “swells” in scale and quickly becomes an early project ship of 3D Realms in 2018.
By 2019, just a few months before its launch, Voidpoint, and 3D Realms received cold water: the Iron Maiden rock band sued the two studios because the name of the game was too similar … the name of the band.
And now, Shelly Harrison’s troubled journey has made people angry after spending time reading the long opening paragraph of this article exactly as the spirit in the new title of the game – Ion Fury.
There are quite a few ways for players to get past a classic FPS level: either catch up with the painfully fast speed while quickly turning every target in every corner to dust, or slowly scrutinizing each one aisle to detect the situation, or… memorize the enemy’s position through each “Game Over” and continue to head through each barrier as if you were entangled in a time loop. Similar to their predecessors, Ion Fury doesn’t tie you to a particular style of play. Only your skill, a few guns of the same speed will measure how far you go.
Built on the Build engine, Ion Fury inherits every bizarre quintessence this engine has achieved with Duke, Shadow Warrior, and Blood 25 years ago: environments with high spreads, interacting with objects multi-dimensional enemy model, high voxel detail. The technical side behind the lines of code is the last thing on this list of things you should care about Ion Fury, but everyone will be delighted to realize they can kick off a fanatic’s skull. You can also make use of the skull to jump to heights that are normally unreachable.
But when it comes to Ion Fury’s environment, the Build engine certainly contributes second only to the artist. The gray-blue patches covering the hard material are the ones you’ll see most of the game, but with cleverly utilizing the texture to diversify the material types, the environment in Ion Fury becomes much more vivid compared to games on the Build platform 20 years ago. With a 12-hour game with 70% of its time revolving around a fictional industrial city, Ion Fury immerses itself in the flow of 90s sound, where you can easily find things. like a cyborg, a haunted mansion, and several easter eggs about the Terminator. All make the sound of Ion Fury seem never to subside.
Ion Fury also works similarly to a 90s FPS game, because your job is merely to find the color card to open the corresponding door. If you’re not looking for a color card, you’re probably trying to sabotage or blow up something that’s blocking your way. If you didn’t blow something up then you are probably looking for secrets in each area. By the way, each section (the game has 7 chapters, each chapter has 5-6 zones) contains 20 to 27 secrets, so if you want 100% of all Ion Fury, I hope you have prepared the backup button E keycap.
It’s the “skin” part, and the “meat” part of Ion Fury is almost everything you’d expect in a Build engine FPS game. You’ve used all of these weapons in previous shooting games, but just because a car is good doesn’t mean it’s worth throwing away just because it’s not as advanced. The close-range shotgun (and perhaps a bit too powerful at long range) can be converted to a grenade launcher with the right mouse button. SMG can switch to a two-gun mode. The revolver can mark the target and fire automatically when you release the right mouse button.
The weapons in Ion Fury are probably more of a stick-set spirit. The game wants you to plunge into danger and use reflexes, aiming skills, and improvisation to show the enemy who is standing on the top of the food chain, and that feeling has never become boring in Ion Fury. Switching between a few guns you have, while quickly hiding behind the barrier and groping for blood boxes along the way quickly becomes gameplay that players self-draw from experience, not by the game shouts at you the message “MUST PLAY LIKE THIS”. New mechanics for Build-based games like headshots or blood reserves make Ion Fury’s flow of action even smoother.
Weapons may be meager, but the same is difficult to apply to the enemy type in Ion Fury. Whatever your opinion of enemies using hitscan weapons, it is very difficult to describe targets that you can bombard in the game with two words “boring”. It’s a combination of regular infantry units, zealots in red that shoot painful projectile bullets, swarms of mechanical spiders carrying human skulls crawling towards you as if your friend is covered with chocolate, and Other creatures are difficult to describe in specific words. The writer’s favorite enemy is a cyborg (?) With a human body but no skin, a glowing blue skull, attacking you with a super funny kick right after invisibility, when defeated. I would kneel as if I were about to perform seppuku and explode like fireworks.
As a whole, Ion Fury is a satisfactory game from the core of the gameplay, screen design, art, music, to replay value. It was the first commercially built game in the past 20 years, and it didn’t get the same level of investment from 3D Realms. So it can be said, the existence of Ion Fury up to now is still a miracle, and its quality is a testament to that miracle itself.
However, I want to see that 5 years later, fans of the Build-based FPS series will put Ion Fury in the middle of the legendary trio of Duke Nukem – Shadow Warrior – Blood. That’s because, even though Ion Fury is a brilliant game, it lacks the “wow” factor that makes people admire, just like DUSK did last year.
These are probably the two biggest aspects of the game. As mentioned above, Ion Fury’s weapons are familiar and only really promote their strengths when players sink into the powerful flow of action of the game. The absence of a Voodoo Doll or Shrink Ray makes the game’s identity much less distinctive. The bomb rolling like a bowling ball is the most creative weapon in Ion Fury, but the way it works is simply “drop and forget”, rather than making the player laugh when dropping a pack of Dynamite in an arc-like in Blood.
Ion Fury’s gameplay design has another problem. The game has a fairly unforgiving challenge, it’s quite fortunate that the game has very few hanging traps compared to Blood and Shadow Warrior, but it is still quite difficult for veteran FPS players at the third level (out of total number four) is the Ultra Viscera. The problem here is that with each level having more than 20 secrets and most of them will reward you with a large amount of blood/ammunition, the difficulty of Ion Fury sometimes becomes quite unbalanced depending on the number of secrets you find. Find too many, the game becomes a bit too easy. Leaving aside most of the secrets, you will more or less mess.
Finally, Ion Fury also possesses the characteristic cheesy sound of the legendary trio on the Build platform, including a cool, tough, and brave main character. However, our Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison is drawn from Duke’s mold so much that I don’t know what to call her other than the “female version of Duke Nukem”. While Caleb stands out with sarcastic language and a tendency to love violence, and Lo Wang has a super flexible tongue and a somewhat … perverted attitude, Shelly loves the “one-liner” coming out of the movies. 80-90 years, fully confident in his abilities, and of course always countering the wicked sarcasm – which was both a Duke trait, but now less ostentatious and somewhat repetitive.