Ion Fury: Aftershock

There was something about the original game for me that kinda held it back, not sure what but this DLC fixed whatever that was. It really does feel like an amalgam of modern game design and that old Build feel. The ending feels a bit like they probably ran out of time and money but it was still a very enjoyable experience all the way through. Even the Half-Life-esque hovercraft stages that were a huge slog in that game (in my opinion) were great.

Playing this expansion was kind of a weird experience. Not only do I not like it very much, but Aftershock made me realize that I've been overrating the original game all along. Coming back to Ion Fury, what I'm seeing is not a modern FPS classic, but a game that can't quite figure out how to do the basics properly. Levels are huge and sprawling and incredibly detailed, but it became clear to me that this isn't a good thing in and of itself. Ion Fury - both the base game end this expansion - kind of fails to have individually memorable concepts for the levels. They're all more or less some variant of a huge open space with a bunch of smaller offshoots that lead back to the big area again. Levels basically play the same. Your weapon loadout is also full of redundancies, which this expansion triples down on. Like, how many ways of throwing an explosive in an arc at a middle distance for area damage do you need? There's like 5 or 6 ways of doing much the same thing. Enemies are also mostly just annoying and the high tier enemies are super easy to squish with one of several overpowered guns. No enemy feels intimidating. Most good FPS games have at least a couple enemies that make you go "oh sh*t!" when you see then, Not this game. Also, the bosses in this expansion were all a total joke. I circle strafed the final boss with the new gun and never got hit. Tape down a button and you can eat a sandwhich while winning. There's also a hovercraft and it makes the whole middle of the game kind of annoying. It's just a bad idea and it plays - predictably - pretty poorly. It's just a gimmick and also has an awfully designed boss battle attached to it. Oof. Ion Fury is ok. But that's it. The level and encounter design is middling, the weapon loadout is unimaginative in the extreme and enemies somehow have worse AI than 90's FPS games. Is Aftershock worth it? You get more of the same, plus some new things that accentuate what's wrong with the main game. So... skip it.

Yet again the mad lads pushed the limits of the build engine in a DLC thats longer than some full campaigns out today. The new easter eggs and abilities and weapons and the new hoverbike are brilliant additions. the map design yet again feels so unique and avoids feeling repetative. The new enemies were fun to engage especially when they were first introduced as I wasnt expecting them at all, but man I wish the enemy variants were more lethal in the higher difficulties (with more weapon quirks to feel wildly different from the stock weapons), heck the new drone didn't drop any mines for some reason so it was literally acting like the normal drone. Hope that gets fixed, as well as the random spots on the road that caused damage to me when I was on my hoverbike, but regardless of that Aftershock was tons of fun and well worth the cost. Side note: On my win 11 laptop the game doesnt display the game if you play full screen at a resolution lower than the max available, choose a lower resolution in windowed mode only, Win 10 didnt give me this issue. Also this game has GOG overlay but doesnt say it does, also no GOG achievments which is odd since Steam has them. 8.8/10

New enemy variety, new ammo types and a new weapon, cool new vehicle (and the game has a vehicle now), new maps and map design (a lot more scrambling around ruined structures this time). It's great, all of it. There's even a new version of the main campaign that adds in all the new expansion content into the base campaign's levels, with occassional tweaks to the level design itself.

The Aftershock expansion brings to the table new weapons and powerups, a hoverbike with an overpowered gun, a new campaign, and a new version of the base game campaign that incorporates those novelties (and whose levels are mirrored for some reason). The new campaign is both shorter and at least somewhat more eventful than the main one (which wasn’t that high a bar to begin with, and didn’t get raised all that much), but still, it manages to strike a nice balance in that regard. The new weapons do add variety, but they are somewhat extra, and probably contribute to the new campaign being easier. The levels are more varied and often include multiple instances of clever backtracking options. Props to the level designers, they did a great job. And once again, the quality of gameplay here smooths over many of the game’s rough edges. The humor helps too (oh, boy, the posters). Still. It should have been the base game with the duration and story of this DLC. Then it would’ve been perfect. As it stands, it’s a solid, above-average addition.