Back in 2023, I decided to play a retro first-person shooter called Ion Fury. Originally released in 2018, Ion Fury is an indie shooter developed on the Build Engine, the game engine popularized primarily by Duke Nukem 3D. It was a fast-paced shooter with a style that was absolutely inspired by Duke Nukem 3D, and while I enjoyed it for the most part, I had some issues with it that held it back from being truly great. Fast forward to 2024, and a sequel has been released known as Phantom Fury. What initially starts off as a tantalizing sequel full of promise ends up spiraling into a bit of a mess as it draws closer to its conclusion.
Phantom Fury is developed by Slipgate Ironworks and published by 3D Realms. You play as Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison as she is awoken from a coma and thrust back into action to stop a mole that has infiltrated the Global Defence Force (GDF). Normally we highlight the developer and publisher in these reviews, but, in this instance, the developer is significant in that Phantom Fury and the predecessor Ion Fury were developed by different studios. In 2023, developer Voidpoint released a long-awaited expansion to their game Ion Fury titled Aftershock, while Slipgate Ironworks was working on this sequel.
Visually speaking, I quite enjoyed the presentation in Phantom Fury. As I play more and more retro-style shooters, the ones I find myself more drawn to are the ones that emulate the style of the original Quake games, that’s to say the games that attempt to replicate the style of early 90’s 3D shooters, rather than the sprite-based games such as DOOM. Phantom Fury is a 3D game that employs pixel art in its textures, and the combination works well here. There is also a strong use of lighting and color throughout the game’s various environments. Whether looking out over a desert canyon bathed in the orange evening glow or blasting through the streets of a ruined Chicago at night, the game definitely has its moments where you stop to take in your surroundings.
Similar to the visuals, the sound effects are nice and crisp. All the weapons have a satisfying crack to them that makes them feel impactful. Just as satisfying in a retro shooter are the sounds for picking up health and armor chunks. It’s hard to describe what is satisfying about them in particular, but it’s like hearing the fizz of a freshly poured soft drink or hitting a piece of metal with a hammer; they just sound nice.
The music on the other hand is a bit underwhelming. The tracks in game are very much in the background, and they sound a bit generic, nothing really stands out as memorable. At many points, the music disappears entirely, which makes certain levels feel a bit lifeless at times. There are some interesting vistas like I mentioned above that could have been highlighted even more with a bit more music layered in.
If Ion Fury is to be compared to Duke Nukem 3D, then Phantom Fury’s closest point of comparison are Valve’s Half-Life games. From a fundamental standpoint, Phantom Fury is a different type of retro-style shooter, while Ion Fury is a fast-paced firefight blasting away sprites while bunny hopping around every corner, Phantom Fury slows the pace down for more grounded combat exchanges, at least at the start. Both games feature the keycard hunting style gameplay progression that’s basically become a trope of the genre at this point, but Phantom Fury tries to inject a bit more puzzle-oriented gameplay around that structure. Similar to the Half-Life games, there are a number of physics-based puzzles as well as ones that involve redirecting power to access different areas of a given level.
These puzzles do serve to break up the gameplay between combat sections, but they aren’t doing anything new or interesting. There are puzzles that involve using a crane to stack physics objects in order to reach a higher path, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with these, it just feels like a distraction more than an engaging puzzle. For anyone who has played a Half-Life game before, Phantom Fury doesn’t really evolve anything you would have done in those games, and if you haven’t played a Half-Life, I still don’t think the puzzles will blow you away or stump you in any significant way.
I want to transition to talking about level design because they are partially tied to the game’s puzzle-solving. The levels in Phantom Fury are fairly large with multiple layers and side paths to go down, while still remaining linear. The problem I ran into with the level design was that at many points it wasn’t exactly clear how to proceed forward past certain obstacles. Part of this was due to objects that could be interacted with not being highlighted or standing out clearly as something that could be interacted with unless you were right on top of them. There was a level in the second half of the game that I doubled back and searched for a path forward for probably 15 to 20 minutes until I discovered I had to shoot a valve on the opposite side of a tank to let some acid out to melt a path forward.
There are elements of the environment like doors and elevators, some of which allow you to open and walk into, some are static with invisible walls, but they look identical. All of these, plus areas that look like a path forward that end up being a dead-end, all combine to make some levels that are confusing to navigate. Which is weird for a game that is primarily a linear first-person shooter. Some levels are better than others in this regard, but there were several instances where I got lost or looped around multiple times, only to discover it was some tiny interactable object I missed or something that looked like background dressing that had an actual function. So while the levels themselves look nice, in practice they are very inconsistent in how fun they are to explore and play in.
As I said, Phantom Fury is a first-person shooter, and it’s taken me quite a while in this review to bring up the actual shooting, it’s serviceable but also pretty basic. Throughout the game, you build up an arsenal of different weapons from pistols to shotguns to assault rifles and energy weapons. Some of these are returning weapons from Ion Fury like the energy crossbow, dual SMGs, the bowling bombs, and Shelly’s iconic Loverboy revolver, while others are new entries like a plasma rifle and a mutant insect launcher. Some enemies react to being hit by gunfire which adds to the feeling of impact the weapons have, but other enemies don’t react much at all. While the game gives you plenty of weapons to fill up your arsenal, many of them feel a bit pointless compared to others. The revolver, for instance, has the ability to lock onto enemies for some quickdraw style shootouts which is powerful and fun to use, whereas a new weapon like the Foam Modulator that shoots out electrified goo just doesn’t seem to do much to the waves of enemies barreling towards you.
There is an upgrade system where you can give new firing modes to Shelly’s weapons in addition to upgrading her armor abilities and the functionality of her bionic arm. Some of these upgrades are meaningful to the gameplay, like the shotgun getting a stun move in the form of a flashlight blast or the plasma rifle gaining the ability to have its projectiles bounce off walls, but other upgrades feel entirely pointless, like an armor upgrade that lets you break items in the environment by sliding into them (something that you never really need to do in any of the levels) and many breakable items don’t have anything inside anyway. So rather than making hard choices about what upgrade I wanted to spend my upgrade materials on, I was trying to figure out which of the upgrades I even wanted to use.
Expanding out from the weapons, the enemies you are shooting at leave a lot to be desired. The enemies themselves are enemies we’ve seen before, you have your zombie-like creatures that shuffle towards you and throw objects your way like the head crab zombies in Half-Life, you have your GDF soldiers that shoot at you from a distance, drones that pop out of vents to poke at you, and brutes that lunge at you to close the distance. Most of them are fought in the same way, shoot at it till it dies. The AI for these enemies is inconsistent and feels unfinished in many ways with some enemies just standing still in the middle of a firefight not moving or shooting or anything. As the game progresses, rather than introducing any challenging enemies that throw a wrench into your strategy, the levels just start dumping enemies in your path constantly to the point that it gets rather annoying. And for the missions towards the end that are quite large, having enemy encounters every 5 feet was starting to get so tiresome that I began just running past enemies altogether. Many fights just end up with enemies running at you in a straight line as you shoot them down, which gets tedious and boring as a result.
Issues with the enemies extend into the game’s boss fights which also could use some improvement. The fights themselves usually offer up a little bit of spectacle due to their larger scale. Some fights include a helicopter (another nod to Half-Life) and large mutant creatures or robots. While the bosses look cool on the surface, they are essentially like fighting any other enemy, shooting it until it dies. But the bosses are much stronger than the regular enemies, so while I was trying to determine whether they had weak points I could go for or not, I usually died a few times, until on one attempt I would randomly dodge more attacks than before and take the boss out which didn’t feel very satisfying in the end. Couple that with the fact that they reuse bosses like the helicopter and it just feels like another element that wasn’t given the proper attention to make it feel like a truly special or climactic moment at the end of a level.
At many points in this review, I have made comparisons between elements of Phantom Fury and Half-Life, and this isn’t without purpose. Phantom Fury is clearly wearing its inspirations on its sleeve, and there’s nothing inherently wrong about paying homage to the games that inspire us. However, while it may borrow elements from other games, it rarely surpasses any of these elements or does anything new with the concepts or ideas. Because of the inconsistent execution of many things from level design to puzzle concepts and combat the game is borrowing, oftentimes the games that are serving as chief inspirations are doing the same things to a better degree. And these cracks reveal themselves more and more as the game goes on. Phantom Fury took me about 15 hours to play through, but due to the repetitive nature of the game it felt more like 20+ hours, which just added to the building frustration for me.
All in all, Phantom Fury isn’t exactly a bad game, it’s just a bit of a mess. A collection of tropes and concepts we’ve seen in other retro shooters that rarely evolves beyond what its predecessors already achieved. If you are looking for something to (somewhat) turn your brain off to or can’t get enough of retro shooters, then Phantom Fury might be your cup of tea. However, if you are looking for a more engaging FPS to sink your teeth into, this one isn’t it. Phantom Fury is available on PC via Steam as well as PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. A review code was provided by the publisher.
