Ion Fury

It's got the attitude, the gameplay, the graphical style, the lovable jankyness, the AI that works well enough to instantly kick your ass on harder difficulties, the wisecracking main character... Even the controversy of 90s era shooters. This new Build Engine game is everything you could want from a straight up first person shooter game. It's got ridiculously detailed levels for a 2.5D shooter, the gameplay is mostly finding keys to progress, but the level pathing helps make the gameplay interesting, dynamic, and fun. You can usually find multiple paths between the choke points that often serve as battle areas. You can collect weapons and health/armor pickups along the way and if you're lucky extra weapons/health/armor/timed-boosts from any secrets you can find along the way. The secrets are numerous and some are really difficult get access too. I think I found about half of them by hunting a normal amount. Once you're stocked up and come to a choke point/arena you engage in battle with waves of mixed enemy types that encourage you to switch your armaments on-the-fly to whatever is most appropriate to the enemy at the time. I find it to be great fun in practice. While the game is pretty linear, it's not all in a straight line, you often backtrack in interesting ways that allows you to experience the enemy arenas from a different POV. The levels all flow nearly seamlessly between one another which creates a nice forward narrative but still allows you to backtrack and rescue 'saved' powerups in some situations. Often 2-3 levels will form a little seamless section where you can go back and forth until you move on past some sort of environmental gate that stops you from returning later. I am very glad to see 3D Realms and Voidpoint succeed with a badass new FPS in a marketplace saturated by MMOs, lootbox singleplyer games, grinding open world games, and pre-order hell.

ION Fury is a very good game built on top of the BUILD engine. It has many elements that made 90's shooters great. That being said, it brings very little to the table. If you are old enough to remember old 90's BUILD games you know that each had their special quirks which were very original and fun in a unique way. On Shadow Warrior you could play with the RC carts, had a laser guided rocket launcher. On Duke3D you had the shrinker weapon (remember those puzzles where you had to shrink yourself??), freeze weapon etc. Other games of the era like Blood had proximity bombs, voodoo dolls, etc. ION Fury seems like an step back in this aspect. Shelly's arsenal is, ok I guess but nothing new or particularly thrilling. You have the stun baton, the obligatory shotgun, the bombs. And that is where ION Fury suffers the most, because the same can be said for the levels, and the sprites. Which even though are gorgeous and carefully designed you never get the feeling that you are really somewhere new. Every game of that era succeeded immersing the player by changing the setting radically. Duke Nukem's trip from L.A. to the canyons felt very differently with environments changing radically, or making his way through a spaceship in the second episode. Same with Caleb's raising from the grave, riding a haunted train, and descending to the depths of hell itself in Monolith's Blood. ION Fury feels same-y in that regard with every scenario feeling like a deja-vu of the previous one. Enemies also feel extremely repetitive with hordes of red and yellow robots shooting at you and occasionally some small annoying cyber spiders. Most of them are very static, briefly moving and then shooting at you. All in all ION Fury is a good game, but it doesn't particularly stand out against the games that it tries to emulate (specially against the ones from the late 90's ).

Did you ever play (and like) Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior or Blood? Get it! Not just because this is a game made on the Build engine, but it's a true callback to the best FPS's of the 90's. The action is fast, there's a good roster of enemies requiring quick thinking and reaction. The weapons are pretty fun too with some good alternate firing modes to give more flexibility. Visuals look good, the sprites are well made, with a good amount of detail and animation put into it, the stages actually look nice even if they don't use all the best effects that the latest GPUs can pull off nowdays. The art-style of the game is just good enough that you don't need the latest eye-candy effects to appreciate the visuals. The levels are huge, the amount of detail put into these are ridiculous (in a good way), I've played a lot of the classic Build games none of them felt like they had maps as big and detailed as the ones from this game while still retaining the good maze-like elements which involve finding the right keys and items to open up the stage. Plus there's a lot of little nods and easter eggs to other games as well, for people that grew up playing games in the 90's there's a lot of fun stuff here. Sound design is good, there's a sound cue for nearly every enemy, weapon sounds are good with a good punch to it and the music is well done and fitting. While I haven't finished the game yet, this feels like it'll be a great one to re-visit time and again after beating it just like Duke3D, SW and Blood are. Oh and controversy? Review-bombing? Oh please, just play the game and review for it's merits, not for whatever silly reason that doesn't really affect the enjoyment of playing the game. I don't like the so called SJW crowd, but review-bombing the game because they nearly caved to pressure is equally silly.

its not a five star game, but c'mon its fun.

Amazing, detailed maps, loads of awesome references/jokes, punchy sound and sick music. Took me 14 hours to complete and I missed quite a bit of secrets. Highly recommend