Ion Fury

Another great retro platformer that delivers, this time even made with the classic Build engine, so it really is oldschool and doesn't just look like it (the most amazing and refreshing thing from today's perspective is that it only takes up 100mb on the harddisk, even less than Hedon). Now, I'm that odd guy on GOG who was never that much into the old Build engine games, I always preferred DOOM and never finished Shadow Warrior, Blood, or even Duke Nukem 3D. But I finished Ion Fury today.

I loved the graphics, the atmospheric environments, the open sprawling levels, the cheesy one-liners, the varied opponents (that you can expect from any good FPS), the many secrets and different opportunities to approach an encounter, all quite reminiscent of the classics, but much more exciting, in my book, because of the ass-kicking soundtrack, Shelly's great voiceovers and the sound design of the weapons that all pack quite a punch. There was variety in the environments, too, although not as much as in DUSK or even Amid Evil, it's a bit more homogenous and the levels all play the same, but that's fine.

In the beginning, it took me a bit to get accustomed to the gameplay, after having played the other retro platformer first, for various reason. The opponents for example seemed harder to distinguish from the background, and that was a bit irritating at first, but once I had learnt to advance cautiously with open eyes, it became fun. It also adds to the atmophere that the enemies are affected by the lighting they walk through. The game allows manual saving and quicksaves just like the classics and also autosaves occasionally, which is all very nice. What i didn't like so much though is that (just as in DUSK and Hedon, IIRC) the first time you press the Quicksave button in your session, you always have to define a saveslot for the quicksave again. And if you overwite old savefiles and rename them, they are not moved to the top of the list, so you need to remember the name of your last savegame if you want to find it again. And "Continue" from the main menu will not just load the most recently used savefile automatically either, you still have to pick a savefile manually (so contrary to most modern games, here "Continue" is actually just what others call "Load", no ease-of-use feature).

There were a few more things I wasn't particularly fond of. The physics of the gibbage leftovers are a matter of taste, I'm sure many oldschool players will love them, but I found it a bit excessive and distracting that you constantly kick bloody heads around by accident, and they even make loud squishy noises when you do, enough to make you jump until you've learnt to distinguish them from actual enemy sounds. Maybe keeping you on edge is the whole purpose of these things, maybe not, dunno. Personally, I could have done without them, but YMMV. And I hated the sneaky headcrab/spider things, but I guess you are supposed to hate them, and they're not quite as bad as rats. ;P

More seriously, the levels feel big and open and connected at first, often allowing you to backtrack to previous areas if you like, but the game is also split into "zones" and you can't get back to those, so the overall progress through the game is actually linear and you can't even select individual levels or zones from the main menu like in DUSK, so if you'd like to replay individual levels, you'd have to replay the whole game. That's pretty common for FPS, of course, just saying that the game makes you think it's different at first (more like Strife), but it really isn't. Maybe you can access individuals levels via Cheat Codes, but you'd have to look them up on the net, I guess. So there are many points of no return, and therefor the game keeps warning you about all the secrets you've missed if you're about to leave a zone, which is very fair, but also a bit distracting. Instead of making you feel good about having found a secret or two, it constanly teases and stresses you about the 10+ secrets per zone that you've missed for 100% completion and (tongue-in-cheek) being a "real" gamer. I'd have preferred to not even know about any secrets that I missed, but I decided to just ignore that.

The levels can also get a bit confusing and labyrinthine due to their seize, and while there are two types of maps and they both look very nice, they don't clearly show any of the doors locked with colored access cards - the one reason why you might even need to look at a map in a FPS game, after finding an access card and realizing you have forgotten where the according door is. So in the end, the maps are not much more helpful than not having any maps at all, since you need to memorize all points of interest yourself anyway. Also, the game does not show or tell you that you can bash in the grilles of ventilation shafts, which would be perfectly fine, if this mechanic was only used for optional secrets and if this mechanic was consistent. But it only works on particular grilles, while other grilles are just part of the background. And you can learn to distinguish them if you know that, but I started out attempting to bash all grilles I spotted, out of habit, and when it did not work on the first couple of grilles I tried, I began to ignore them. But there is one spot where you absolutely need to enter a hidden ventilation shaft in order to progress, and since I was under the impression that bashing in grilles and entering ventilation shafts is not part of this game, I got seriously stuck and erred around, until I finally decided to check out a walkthrough, something I usually don't need to do for FPS games. So I consider this a design flaw, maybe the most critical of Ion Fury. But after I learnt from the walkthrough what the game had failed to teach me, it was okay. It might also have been the only spot in the game, where bashing in the grille of a ventilation shaft was required.

The weirdest thing about it, btw, was that this particular ventilation shaft also had a running ventilator instead of a regular grille.* So you can't bash in some types of regular grilles (no reaction at all, not even dents in it), but you can destroy and completely remove a running ventilator with one hit. It made just as much sense as not getting electrocuted when you use your electrical baton under water ... There *is* fall damage though, my least favorite type of realism in FPS games. ;) And the precision platforming in the game can be rather frustrating too, due to how small the hitboxes for crates and railing are and how fast and slippery the movements of "rollerblading" Shelly feel. But oh well, that's what quicksaves are for. And last but not least, I hated how many doors opened towards me instead of away from me. That seemed a really clumsy mechanic for a first person game. Stand too close to the door when you pull it open, slam it into your own face and watch it automatically shut again; stand not close enough and the door does not react to your "use" button.

Anyway, those are a couple of things that I think could have been better, but despite all these walls of text, I think the most important paragraph of this review is still the second one. TL:DR It's still a great game despite some minor flaws!



* EDIT: After checking out the old Build games, I realize now that this was taken directly from Duke Nukem 3D, so anyone who has played that would probably have known and not gotten lost like I did. Still a design flaw in my book and a bit lazy, if the solution to getting stuck in Ion Fury is just being familiar with how Duke Nukem 3D introduced ventilation shafts.