For me this game is a part of new "Big Three" along with Dusk and Amid Evil. It was the last one I played, and after I made it through twice, on penultimate and ultimate difficulty, and found all secrets (oh God...), I think I am ready to make this review. Ion Fury is an heir to the Build games - Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior and Blood. My relations with these games are like this: love and cherish Blood and Duke, still re-playing them from time to time, never bored, always fun. Absolutely loathe SW, found it almost unplayable both back in the days, and much later in 20XX's when I started rediscovering old games, never made a playthrough and doubt I ever will. Technically IF is a masterpiece of Build-engine engineering. Aesthetically it's a definite callback to Duke 3D, but gameplay-wise, I think, is much closer to Blood and Shadow Warrior. If you want a lot of vocal and accurate description of the good stuff in this game go watch Civvie11, it's worth it. My problem is, half way through the game I... got bored. And for a game that wants to be an heir to Blood and Duke that's like a death penalty. Around the levels where game introduces final enemies - pretty standard mutant zombies who come in packs, make your ears bleed with irritating sounds and have the sole purpose of draining your ammo, because at this point you definitely feel NO trouble with ammo management whatsoever. Yes, on maximum difficulty. No fun looking for secrets, no fun blowing up enemies - game burned out. In comparison, Dusk and Amid Evil grabbed you by the throat and kept you on your toes from beginning to the end. So did Blood and Duke 3d. Ion Fury... drags. Overall, it's a solid, solid game. But of my neo-Big Three it's also the weakest one. An expansion is coming up this year, with a vehicle sections added, some new enemies and weapons... It has a chance to improve a lot, or to repeat all the same and make it even worse. We will see. As I said, this game inherited some big shoes to fill.
Never managed to make it work. Windows 7, 64. I tried reinstalling DirectX, installing KB3080149 update pack and the pack with old DirectX files from Microsoft, reinstalling all video drivers, turning off/uninstalling anti-virus - still "d3dcompiler_47.dll" is missing error. Took me about 6 hours, sorry, I am done with it. Not refunding because I got it for dirt cheap at the current sale, but stil extremely disappointed for wasted time, efforts and hopes. Fail.
I was a huge fan of original Sacred 9yes, we exist), so the hype for Sacred 2 was huge. When it came out though, it was a gigantic disappointment. Pros: 1) Gigantic world 2) Great character designs 3) Awesome skill and skill mechanics (on paper) 4) Beautiful picture 5) Class mounts Cons: 1) World is empty and pointless - there is nothing to do here. 2) Character design is all that is good about them - they are severely unbalanced, and chars like Inquisitor or Temple Guardian are borderline unplayable. 3) Same goes for skills - tons of skills are just useless or to week to make any difference, some specs are completely unviable. 4) Again, world is HUGE, non-linear, filled with unique locations, dungeons, unexpected and unusual side-quests... and it's all POINTLESS. You get NOTHING from exploring it - no loot, no plot bonuses, no perks (sans class mount, but it's a single exception and basically embedded into story mode), NO MOTIVATION AT ALL. It kills the game. 5) Add-on was simply unplayable on release, of 5 copies 4 would not work at all. It was fixed later, but it brought nothing good - unlike Sacred: Underworld, both new locations and a single new hero were just plain stupid. 6) It's a prequel, but it as well be another game - there is 99% nothing that calls forward to original Sacred (sans Seraphim) and one location from the addon. 7) Story is extremely weak, and you completely lose the point of this whole location jumping very soon. Character strories could have improved it a lot, but they did not. Bosses fail. Probably some of the aforementioned has been polished since, but I still not feeling like paying anything for this game. Maybe when some uber sale lowers it to something like 2$ I'll do it out of boredom. P.S. I have a suspicion, that Blizzard took A LOT from Sacred 2 for Diablo 3. Skill runes, level scaling, ton of difficulty levels, and A LOT of the same problems. Why did they choose such a failed product as an inspiration I can not comprehend.
