What can I say, it's an excellent game. The atmosphere, the weapons, ennemies and level design are excellent. Fresh Supply is a good port. The only downside I see is that they didn't increase the sprite and wall count limits, so the newer user made maps which go beyond these limits are not compatible, but you can always install a source port to use with the original game files which come with Fresh Supply, if you want. The only other problem I had up to now is a bug crashing the game in the sample maps of the level editor. If this bug doesn't happen in the game's maps, then it's not really an issue. Didn't have it happen for now (played 2 episodes).
I didn't play the whole game yet, far from it. But from what I've seen, to me as far as Build engine games go, this one is up there among the best of them. I've played on Ultra Viscera difficulty (just below max in the base game), and I found the combat challenging and interesting. I often had to think about how to approach a fighting situation and retry with a better strategy. Save scumming is part of the gameplay in this kind of games, that's how I see it. I wouldn't mind a rewind feature. There is a checkpoints feature in the DLC that I did not try out yet. The level design is amazing. I mean, if you ever made maps for Build engine games, it's always interesting to see how level designers overcome the limitations of the engine, and in Ion Fury it is impressive. Of course they use an enhanced version of Build, and they developped their own features on top of it, but at the core they still have the same old limitations regarding geometry, yet the maps are beautiful and detailed. A lot of impressive sprite work and impressive layouts. You can see the level(s) designer(s) have years of experience. There are a few technical problems. When I installed the DLC I saw my framerate drop just a little bit, I think. But I'm on a "low end" PC, in that I have no GPU. The game still runs nicely overall, just had to lower the resolution a bit and it's good as new. Also my saved games "disappeared", i.e. the expansion changed the path where it looks for the saves but did not move my save files there! But after looking into it I managed to restore them, so no hard feelings. If you love Build engine games or simply want a fun old-school shooter beautifully crafted by a small team, then I would definitely recommend Ion Fury.
The game is pretty, and it may provide a good moment of fun. But I'll be honest, it's kinda easy to cheese. Maybe I should go back and see if there are more viable strategies, but last time I played I found only one such approach, and it quickly became a repetitive loop which was earning me a lot of money. I also had fires starting around my cities very regularly, auto pausing the game, which was only an annoyance, not something to really care about or plan around. I find the old SNES version much more difficult, but maybe that's just me. Maybe if you self impose some challenge, like having no poor neighborhood, this one can be more difficult. I don't know how good are the more recent iterations in the genre, but I wouldn't bet this one is the best it has to offer.
I played for some five hours, I like this game. Not perfect but very good. Maybe not very original as gameplay goes, but the ambiance and the graphics are lovely. I saw many people had, like myself, troubles with the responsivness of the controls. Solution : turn off v-sync. Turning on v-sync on the graphics card driver settings instead of per-application seems to be often recommended anyway.
