Imagine if you took the pulp sci-fi look of the Blake Stone series of games (with a heaping of Synthwave aesthetics thrown in for good measure), put ION Fury's main character in it (but more eldritch and unhinged; you can tell Caroline's voice actress is having a lot of fun voicing the character) and covered it all with some tasty Doom Eternal gameplay sauce, i.e.: - Lighting fast combat. - Extremely powerful and accurate enemies. - Slick air control - Dashing maneuvers - Having to kill to replenish resources, specially health. and you've got yourself Viscerafest. Even if it's still in early access, what is already here (the complete first chapter of a planned 3) puts a lot of other FPS games to shame. And the music! It's a sort of synthwave-metal hybrid that sounds as if Quake 2 had been developed by Amiga demosceners. IMHO, it's Markie Music's best work to date. Also, the king of video s**tposting himself Gianni Matragrano voices several characters in the game. What's not to like?. Word of warning, though, this game is very, very difficult. It expects you to be very quick on your feet and pulls no punches at all. One of the best retro-throwback FPS of recent years by far, imho. Way up there with the new greats of the genre like DUSK and ION Fury.
I'm split between ION Fury and Blood for best Build engine game. But I tend to go with this one for that title because the spectacular cyberpunk setting is more appealing to my taste than Blood's wild west horror theme. That said, ION Fury has all the fun, speed and bombast one would expect from the Build engine games (or at least from the holy Build trinity of Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior and Blood) but with a much grander and modern sense of scale. I would personally compare it to the mod Death Wish for Blood (but not as difficult), or the DNF mod for Duke Nukem 3D to get an idea of what to expect here, and as I understand, some of the map makers for the DNF mod actually worked in ION Fury. And compared to other games from the recent Boomer Shooter renaissance (think DUSK, Amid Evil, Devil Daggers, Hedon, etc.), this is in my opinion the single best one of them all and alongside Hedon, the most 90's authentic too.
