Incline Ion Fury (formerly Ion Maiden) - Build Engine powered FPS by Duke Nukem 3D mappers - now with Aftershock DLC

[Curratum]

Such a shame they couldn't just make a new Duke Nukem game. One liners from this chick seem cringe inducing.

There's a setting in the menu that allows you to mute her entirely. And thank god because her repertoire is limited and she spews them out a lot more often than Duke did.

 

[Boleskine]

Shillmanlives hath spoken.

Spoiler

 

[ironmask]

I'm afraid ALL of shillmanlives's criticisms are very valid, given what I've seen in the early access and what I see in the gameplay and his examples.

Yeah I also mostly agree with Shillman in this video too. It's just more fun to call him a shill.

 

[Boleskine]

PCGamer - 77/100

Ion Fury review
More than an homage to Duke Nukem, this retro FPS brings '90s FPSes to life in 2019.
By Evan Lahti 3 hours ago

There are two ways to play a neo-retro shooter like Ion Fury. One: embrace its zippy movement like you're speedrunning a '90s action movie, twitching and snapshotting your way through corridors. Two: meticulously run your eyes and hands along every pixelated surface until you've combed the entire map for secrets.

2019 is tiny renaissance for new FPSes inspired by old FPSes. Where Amid Evil and Dusk conjured the spirit of Quake and Heretic, Ion Fury is published by the company that created Duke Nukem 3D, in a retrofitted version of the original Build Engine. It's the gaming equivalent of a band reuniting for a new album 20 years later.

Ion Fury does recreate many of the things that made Duke Nukem 3D great. An action hero's arsenal. Cheesy one-liners. Bright, expansive environments are dense with enemies and hard-to-spot secret passages. At one point I had to stun an enemy with my electrified baton, crouch-jump onto their skull, and leap to a ledge in order to reach a hidden area.

But as it doubles down on the past, Ion Fury retains some of that era's limitations, too: dead-simple boss behavior, paper-thin storytelling, and a modest feeling of repetition toward the end of its 10-hour campaign. Still, it's potent nostalgia for anyone with affection for or curiosity about '90s FPSes.

VIDEO: A sample of Ion Fury's speedy combat flow, capped off by a minor Easter Egg.

Despite its deep connection to Duke Nukem, Ion Fury's tone is surprisingly different. Supercop heroine Shelly Hamilton (originally written as Duke's sidekick in Duke Nukem Forever) isn't the crass, over-the-top parody that her crew-cutted cousin is. She drops catchphrases, but they aren't crude. The enemies she shoots are similarly serious, an army of cloaked soldiers and a few spooky man-machine hybrids that are miles away from pig cops in a strip club.

Ion Fury feels a little more like RoboCop Doom—self-aware, but not truly silly—than it does Duke Nukem, then. And while I think that the game's setting is actually one of its best aspects, there were times that I missed the outright stupidity of Duke, particularly in Ion Fury's relatively vanilla weapon set.

You've shot most of these guns before. Generally 3D Realms' approach is to take the genre staples that've sat along your keyboard's number keys for years and plug in little variations on the alt fire button. You can dual-wield the SMGs, which ignite enemies with incendiary ammo. You can spin the chaingun without firing it, like Team Fortress 2's Heavy. You can load the shotgun with shells or pipe grenades, which doesn't so much feel like an exciting alt-fire mode as it does a way of merging two conventional weapons.

The guns are a little too familiar. Given its mad scientist villain and near-future setting, I wanted Ion Fury to put something ridiculous in my hands. The closest the game comes to a bona fide BFG are explosive discs that erupt into a fat cloud of cluster bombs. And there's the Bowling Bomb, a rolling grenade that homes-in on enemies when you charge it up—playful, but a little too fire-and-forget for my liking. It feels good to crack open a door and detonate an entire room with one of these throwables, but you can find weirder weapons in Duke Nukem fan mod Alien Armageddon, which offers rolling turret bots, an ice cannon, and an RPG that lobs miniature nukes. Is it wrong to expect a retro shooter to deliver something new?

Other gripes: I don't love how effective the shotgun is at longer ranges because it means I rarely put it down. Auto-aim kicks in occasionally and can't be disabled, a particular annoyance on single-shot guns like the energy crossbow.

The weapons individually underwhelm, but they work well enough as a team. Like most great '90s FPSes, Ion Fury feels best when you sprint into danger and then improvise your way out of it, cycling between five or six guns as you crouch-dodge, circle-strafe, run out of ammo, and lunge for a health kit. Headshots are a welcome modern detail, and the feeling of melting Ion Fury's basic enemy with a single revolver flick doesn't get old. Runner-up: rebounding a pipe grenade off a door frame to frag the cultist waiting inside.

Ion Fury's hand-placed enemies are often waiting to ambush you around corners, and they put up a good fight. Cyborg skulls with spider legs hang on the ceiling ready to jump on you if you don't look up. Legless jetpack monstrosities fling lines of micro rockets at you, filling corridors with splash damage. My favorites were the mobile minibosses which emerge halfway through the game and finally forced me to backpedal. It's crucial to pick a difficulty level that challenges you, as you can't change this setting mid-campaign (although Ion Fury's seven chapters can be launched individually).

But Ion Fury's chapter bosses are less reliable. They certainly check the nostalgia box with their simple scripting and exploitability. At their best, you're jumping around a big room at full speed in order to beat them, emptying every gun you're carrying. At their worst, you're standing still and unloading eight uninterrupted grenades into a cybernetic tank man who's been outsmarted by stairs. 3D Realms' reluctance to bring too much of the present into Ion Fury hurts the game here.

If they Build it, we'll come
Developer Voidpoint's love of the genre is tangible inside Ion Fury's levels. I love the game's color palette, the coat of blue-grey textures and sprites that stay with you as you shoot your way through slightly-futuristic cities and underground labs, walls that are coated with variously easy-to-spot references to Doom, Duke, Half-Life, and other games of the era. The whole world feels like its been marinating in its own juices since 1996, and almost every corner feels hand-crafted. At one point I stumbled into a Hogan's Alley police training course mixed with paper targets and enemies. Behind a bar, I threw Bowling Bombs down a literal bowling alley crawling with cyborg spiders. A couple of dank, muddy sections are the only exception.

True to its retro inspiration, Ion Fury relies almost entirely on colored security keycards to gate progress through these levels. And even truer to those Nukem roots, the other way that Ion Fury opens doors is with explosions (these are so frequent that Shelly eventually remarks in exasperation that every time she touches a button, something blows up). These paths are laid out elegantly. Every level builds in an amount of fun backtracking, and subtle signposting means that you feel smart when you make your way through the maze.

It's worth noting that Ion Fury's Build Engine backbone doesn't present any technical issues. The game supports widescreen resolutions and an FOV range of 70-120, and an fps cap of 240—Ion Fury is one of the rare games that you'll probably be able to hit that ceiling if you're running a variable refresh display. Quicksave and quickload are right there on F6 and F9, but you can limit the number of saves or disable checkpoints for a more spartan experience.

Even alongside other recent, excellent retro FPSes, Ion Fury reminds us of how much this period of PC gaming has to offer. It's surely the best thing that's ever happened in the Build Engine, and although limitations of enemy and weapon design reveal themselves over time, the swift movement and sleek maps make Ion Fury a worthy indulgence in the past.

The Verdict
77
Read our review policy
Ion Fury
A retro FPS built with love by true enthusiasts of the genre.

 

[CyberModuled]

Honestly can't help but be severely disappointed with the fact that there are no more weapons from Early Access to final game other than the disc explosive that was shown in the final trailer (especially when bowling bombs are supposed to be the "signature" throwable weapon). Kind of reminiscent of an issue I had with DUSK where you basically get all of your weapons within the first episode and have the same ones for the rest of the game (though at least DUSK had power-ups, not sure about Fury other than that temporary unlimited bowling bomb one).

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

I'm starting to get sick of these oldschoold pixalated throwback shooters. It's like the industry is being flooded with them.

 

[Ovg]

Why do you people keep linking and referring to RPS? Why do you keep being surprised and annoyed / confused / angry that they're morons?

Khatarsis. Or rather bettering our own self esteem. And if any codex new meat doeasnt know, we will save them from bad reviews.

 

[Citizen]

Never forget about the l337 skillz game journos have.

Is that how playing FPSes with a controller looks like?

 

[Daedalos]

Abit disappointed to hear about the weapons... I guess they went with more convertional weapons, but as shillman says, it would have been tasteful to include some zanzy weapons in the style of the 90s fpss

 

[d1r]

Such a shame they couldn't just make a new Duke Nukem game. One liners from this chick seem cringe inducing.

I just hope that someone manages to mod in a "Lo Wang" sound mod soon enough. Playing these kind of games without any or with really really shitty one-liners is kinda unfaithful to the Build Engine era.

 

[Makabb]

Such a shame they couldn't just make a new Duke Nukem game. One liners from this chick seem cringe inducing.

but its woke honk honk

 

[Morgoth]

Shillmanlives hath spoken.

Boring weapon arsenal, monotonous progression, so-so level design, chronic ammo shortage (my main complaint from the EA version).

Not sure of this is enough for Ion Fury to enhance the must-have Build-Engine trio into a quartet.

 

[abija]

Is that how playing FPSes with a controller looks like?

No, he's just impaired. (And I hate controllers so much I played DS1 with keyboard only. That guy probably trips on the ball while playing soccer or on his own legs while running.)

 

[Curratum]

Boring weapon arsenal, monotonous progression, so-so level design, chronic ammo shortage (my main complaint from the EA version).

Not sure of this is enough for Ion Fury to enhance the must-have Build-Engine trio into a quartet.

The level design in EAccess was indeed just ok, with the exception of the manor house which was pretty good. However, I did beat the EA campaign on the max difficulty and never had any real ammo issues. On that difficulty you need to aim for the head anyway because otherwise you eat a lot of damage, so maybe that helped?

Even if the game turns out to be less than what we imagined, it would still be more than enough to turn the Build trio in a quarter though, because Shadow Warrior is such a piss-poor game, it's not very difficult to do better.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

I usually defend RPS, but Christ that review was idiotic. It wasn't even a review, just an extended "I have now idea why I'm expected to review this as it's not my thing." I've noticed lately that that Matt guy is a dumbfuck, in that I will be reading an article there, it stands out as uniquely shitty, so I scroll down to see who wrote it, and it's always him.

 

[Durandal]

I'm starting to get sick of these oldschoold pixalated throwback shooters. It's like the industry is being flooded with them.

called it

 

[taxalot]

The RPS review is pretty hilarious. It first lies about being an actual review of the game and then it is a long text that is actually brutally honest about the reviewer admitting he is absolutely incompetent at playing the game and reviewing it.

Which begs the question: you are the editor of RPS, you have a text that does not fulfill the job required and instead an admission of a failed job, what do you do ?
Common competent paper : give the assignment to someone else.
RPS : why, publish it of course !

 

[Tacgnol]

The RPS review is pretty hilarious. It first lies about being an actual review of the game and then it is a long text that is actually brutally honest about the reviewer admitting he is absolutely incompetent at playing the game and reviewing it.

Which begs the question: you are the editor of RPS, you have a text that does not fulfill the job required and instead an admission of a failed job, what do you do ?
Common competent paper : give the assignment to someone else.
RPS : why, publish it of course !

Yeah, I just read that RPS review.

You can basically sum it up as: I don't like this genre but I was told I had to write a review on it anyway.

Hell, if they wanted multiple perspectives they could have just done the codex classic and had multiple reviews.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

So, is the full game significantly better than the ea content?

I also find it pretty weird how none of the reviews seem to mention the fact that the game's enemy cast is boring enough to rival modern military shooters. Are people OK with that?

 

[Belegarsson]

While this RPS reviewer is most certainly a plebeian and a scrub, this review may show some signs that Ion Fury is falling for a minor meme which I fear seems to be taking hold lately, namely that good FPS level design is being automatically equated to giant interconnected Souls-ian behemoths of a level filled with tons of exploration-bait, secrets, and what have you. It's something that seemed to have started with some of the giga-levels in Quake: Arcane Dimensions like The Forgotten Sepulcher which everyone agreed was good without really being able to put it in words other than "because it made my peepee hard". Now you have Ion Fury with "zones" instead of levels and Wrath promising to do the same thing.

This is by no means a condemnation of AD or Ion Fury or giga-levels in general, but I fear that if we mindlessly assign pseudo-Metroidvania worlds as the golden standard of FPS level design for what they set out to do rather than the qualities that make their scope work, that we'll have morons complaining about short 'n sweet Scythe-like levels for being too small, and developers trying to follow this fad but only end up overstretching themselves by creating overly huge levels with too many secrets and pointless side-areas with tons of unnecessary backtracking.

I spent 12 hours in the full game and I definitely agree half the levels of the game are way too big, especially in zone 4 - 5.

Ammo supplement is also a bit weird that you can stock up too much resource due to each level having 20 - 27 secrets, but if you just pick up everything in sight without digging for stashes then you will run out of ammo fast.

 

[Cross]

Do you guys want to see a review even more aggravating than the RPS one?

https://metro.co.uk/2019/08/15/ion-fury-review-nuking-the-duke-10573942/

When first person shooters first came into existence, they were almost all extremely fast-paced games with little to no tactical nuance. Duke Nukem 3D added much larger and more interactive maps but they were still basically shooting galleries, with no real puzzles or other gameplay elements. Things started to change when consoles became powerful enough to run them, with 1997’s GoldenEye 007 introducing the idea of slower-paced, more realistic gameplay – a year before Half-Life changed things forever on PC.

It’s easy to argue that Ion Fury would have been more interesting if it tried to evolve the genre, as it was then, forward in some way; perhaps take the approach of what if graphics technology had plateaued but game design had still evolved along a path similar to now. Most indie retro games already do that to at least some degree, but Ion Fury is adamant that everything has to be exactly how it was in 1996.

If that’s its goal though it’s achieved it almost flawlessly. We doubt even 90s gamers will come away thinking that things used to be better back in their day but it is fascinating to see how much has, and hasn’t, changed and how what was once the state-of-the-art in video games is now nothing but a retro novelty.

In Short: For better and worse, a near perfect replication of mid-90s first person shooters, that makes you wistful for the old days… and secretly glad things have moved on in the meantime.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The RPS review is pretty hilarious. It first lies about being an actual review of the game and then it is a long text that is actually brutally honest about the reviewer admitting he is absolutely incompetent at playing the game and reviewing it.

Which begs the question: you are the editor of RPS, you have a text that does not fulfill the job required and instead an admission of a failed job, what do you do ?
Common competent paper : give the assignment to someone else.
RPS : why, publish it of course !

Maybe there wasn't someone else.

 

[Naraya]

Don't be shy, which one of you wrote this :D

 

[geno]

Leo "DavoX" Pellegrinihoy a las 12:16

6 AM PST / 3:30 PM CEST, ION FURY WILL LAUNCH ON STEAM, GOG AND THE 3D REALMS STORE!

 

[mwnn85]

Shillmanlives hath spoken.

Boring weapon arsenal, monotonous progression, so-so level design, chronic ammo shortage (my main complaint from the EA version).
Not sure of this is enough for Ion Fury to enhance the must-have Build-Engine trio into a quartet.

I feel that's a fair review and touches on most of my niggles with the early access demo.
A shame if those drawbacks have made it into the final release.
The early access build seemed quite good, probably on par with Shadow Warrior.

For me only Duke and Blood show off the best of the Build engine. Quake (1) and both Doom games get added onto my top tier FPS list.
All five of those have top notch weapons, well designed maps and a good mix of monster designs with some clever placement and surprises.

Should be released later today about ~8 hours or so.
I'm expecting something satisfying but not exemplary.