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.

 

[Fedora Master]

Name the peak then

77p Egg

 

[Kabas]

Name the peak then

Arthurian Legends.
Would also like to name Zortch but you already mentioned that you dislike it.

 

[Popot]

3DRealms is just the publishing side of Slipgate Ironworks, they're not two separate studios. Frederik Schreiber (CEO of both companies) is using the 3DR name for brand recognition.

Anyway I too recommend Arthurian Legends, but I advise to try the demo first since its engine is a bit crap, performance may vary.

 

[markec]

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.

Dusk and Hedon.

 

[hajro]

Peak is Death wish.

Hedon good for gooning only, Dusk sucks.

 

[orcinator]

Since this is funded by the Victoria State Government

So this is Australia's answer to Goodbye Volcano High?

 

[Be Kind Rewind]

Instead of making a big fat quote stack I'll give brief commentary on each of the games being nominated for peak of FPS revival, vying to steal the throne from Ion Fury 5/5.

Arthurian Legends - I haven't gotten around to playing this yet, but it looks more like Witchaven than a shooter proper and that more or less excludes from the title. Might still be fun though even if I'm not getting my hopes up to see something like Hexen or Hexen 2 again, if it was the reviews on steam would be mixed at best due to difficulty.

Zortch - I actually don't dislike this, above I made a point about The Last Exterminator aka 90's PC Shooter Callback: The Game actually played like one of the console shooters of the period much more than a PC game. Console shooters are okay, they're a very different beast since they're made to be enjoyed on a couch and some distance away from a TV screen, which gives you the chunky appearance for visibility, and the movement made for a controller. Not as great as PC shooters, but you could do much worse, and Zortch is relatively faithful to that experience while doing its own thing.

Death wish - It's not a throwback, it's a mod for an actual 90's shooter. Blood might be peak, but to be honest I don't think amateur efforts almost ever come close to the original content of the period. Death Wish suffers from overly large levels, sloppy level design, and too many scripted sequences. The core, which is still the peak of the genre, is so excellent that I played through the entire thing anyway and had more fun than with most other games.

Hedon - There are many positive things to be said about Hedon, which is a great fusion of older shooter principles put into a blender together with what old Arkane used to do when they hadn't turned into a studio of faggots owned by Bethesda and later Microsoft yet. I was going to post a review of it in the screenshot thread after playing it for a second time but never got around to it. It can't be overstated how important it is for a video game to have a strong vision and identity and Hedon thanks to being made by some coomer that has spent years building a fantasy world to give plot and context to porn, heavily derivative as it might be, has a lot of character. The level design is also top notch while the shooting takes a page from the book of Blood and makes you think a lot about what weapons you use against which enemies and in a situational context. I don't think a commercial Doom mod can get much better than this.

Dusk - I hate Dusk and everything it stands for. Part of the reason can be found in this thread.

Overload - It's been a long time since I played a six-degree-of-freedom shooter, so I'll be checking this one out. What's interesting about it is that it being included here is that it shows that there's a lot of area outside of the old Doom fundamentalist school of thought and that this borderland between arcade flight game and corridor shooter was the result of a period of experimentation and less formalized genres. Letting you use your joystick for something that doesn't take place in an open sky or in space, but letting you keep your freedom of movement in combination with the line-of-sight changing environment was great when Descent came out. The genre then evaporated into nothing and unless you're into flight-sims it's likely that you don't have a joystick as a PC gamer anymore. It's a shame not more came out of it, because I thought at the time that the genre might go somewhere like Terminal Velocity or Fury3, combining interior and exterior fully open skies environments to make the most of the format, but maybe that would detract from the focus of a game like Descent II.

It doesn't seem likely that any of these will knock down Ion Fury from the top spot, but with some of them it's more of an apples and oranges comparison. Overload might be great in terms of pure gameplay but even from a distance I don't think the playdough-plastic looking graphics will compare to either something like Ion Fury, or indeed the crisp graphics of Descent II. Despite lacking in the graphics department it might be one of the most fun games of the year for me if they actually nailed the gameplay.

 

[Strig]

I think we should start a The Last Exterminator thread, as after reading everything above I was more inclined to check out the demo of that game than to play Phantom Fury. It was... a'ight, I guess. Nothing to write home about. I rather disliked the controls, they indeed feel floaty and it took me a good while to get accustomed. I also got the distinct impression that TLE is bland, safe and sterile. It absolutely lacks any edge, unless someone is impressed with the heroine sometimes uttering "fucking keycards" when you need one. I would even say it lacks any defining characteristics. It's just a poor man's Duke Nukem 3D with a lot, and I mean A LOT, of self-referential humor. Some time ago I wrote this about chink cartoons:

Inspirations are fine but anime is in a vicious cycle of being inspired by other anime which in turn were inspired by another. And the problem is there's no other visible source of influence. And it's drifting ever further away from any common root. That's not taking inspiration, that's incest spawning misshapen rapebabies. There was a sweet spot between '70s and '90s when creators adapted actual literature, drew inspirations from life and arts and created actual stories. Now the process is not "let's make a space Vietnam story", it's "let's make this or that specific genre popular in anime".

Many retro shooters apparently suffered the same fate it seems. They barely acknowledge things that are outside of their genre. Similarly, the process is often not "let's make a shooter inspired by action movies and sci-fi", it's "let's make a shooter inspired by Duke Nukem 3D/Blood/Half-Life/Sin". And then, to top it off, we have turd nuggets like references to YT creators. It's not like I have something against them, I just don't think they're important enough to pay them that much attention. It's not all doom and gloom, however, there were original games that paid homage properly, without resorting to incestuous rape of their progenitor. To the list above I'd add Hrot, it had many faults but I felt at home and the humor was spot on. Ashes 2063 and Ashes: Afterglow, yeah, it's a Doom TC but I don't care, it's better than most retro shooters, sue me. Project: Warlock was fun, and it was made basically by a high-school kid. There still are at least a few games in developement that I have high hopes for, like Fallen Aces and Mouse (this one takes the retro and piles up another retro on top, I love it), all in all I'm glad that retro shooter is a sub-genre of its own, but too many developers lack vision outside of doing a throwback.

 

[v1c70r14]

- invisible walls - because we don't want players to feel any freedom when he is moving through open areas.

I made the mistake of playing Phantom Fury and this stood out to me, the level design is some of the worst I've seen in a shooter. I thought Raven was pretty bad at giving the player a good direction to go in. In Phantom Fury you might think you are supposed to go somewhere or that you are about to find a secret only to launch into an invisible wall. You can stack crates on top of another, but if you do don't expect to jump a fence, the invisible wall reaches up into the clouds. Encounter design also got so bad I uninstalled by the halfway point or two thirds into the game.

Game has the quality assurance of Blood 2 on release, the gameplay formula of the Duke Nukem Forever that we got, and the gamefeel of some of the worst Unity jank. The roof section of the leaked DNF 2001 prototype felt more polished than any segment of this game.