While racing atop a train full of bandits in Phantom Fury, you see another speeding train approaching at the same speed, inviting you to jump from one to the other. A helicopter soon joins the fray. Lots of things are about to explode, and you take a quick break from your minigun to calmly blast some boxes on the stairs with a crane. This first-person shooter isn’t so much about writing a love letter to the bygone era of 2000s shooters as it is about standing outside the window of a respected elder, sincerely serenading them with a beat-up elderly keytar from the attic. There are some bad notes, and the singing voice isn’t exactly boy band-esque, but the love is undeniably there. And, hey, singing is difficult.
It’s a sequel of sorts to Ion Fury, the 2019 shooter developed in Build Engine (the same code soup Duke Nukem crawled out of years earlier). But there are no prerequisites to understanding the story of its predecessor. If you haven’t been following the adventures of Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison, you should know that America is in danger, and you and your up-to-date cybernetic arm are on a mission to save the day.
That hand is a beastly melee button that, I admit, is a bit underrated outside of combat. It can shred an enemy to pieces, on a tiny cooldown. And alongside the other goodies Shelly gets in the form of drops (a bullet-absorbing shield, a suit full of health bonuses), it’s all there for classic running, gunning, and soda-swilling as you pass them in combat. You can also pick up and throw crates, barrels, or – risky – a downed drone’s ticking time bomb.
Full disclosure: I’m an straightforward target for nostalgic re-enactments of genre conventions past, like the ones featured here. There are monstrous neighborhoods, security cameras that track your every move, useful vending machines that sell medicinal cola, strumming guitars, variable-speed ceiling fans, arcade games, basketballs with nets that encourage you to shoot them into hoops, beer taps to pump. The bathrooms are a special homage to old-school detail. The creators don’t just flush toilets, but make it possible to quickly rewind a roll of toilet paper, turn on faucets, dispense soap, and tear off paper towels one by one.
When I mentioned this to the RPS team, Graham asked if it was likely that this dedication to casual interactivity would survive the initial levels. Contrary to expectations, it did. I didn’t finish the game, but almost every level has some up-to-date silliness to it. A lab with glass test chambers full of robots to incinerate at the push of a button. Fire towers with little radios to tune in. Before I start stabbing my critic in the game’s chest with a poker, I want to point out that the attention to (probably unnecessary) interactive detail is something I love and often miss in state-of-the-art shooters.
But I have to get pissed off. It’s a departure from its predecessor in the sense that the fluidity and slipperiness of the Build Engine have been replaced by a slightly more clunky motion. So if you have an unwavering preference for The Way Things Were, this changed sense of heaviness may be off-putting.
I had to get more used to enemy movement. Soldiers pressure you with grenades and ill-advised attacks (dude, that lady has a MEGA ARM). While flying drones harass you with their agile hovering. Their entire behavior makes sense in the context of gunfights, but something about their momentum, their sudden changes of path, feels jerky. And the durability of some of the later enemies undermines the otherwise crackling response of the firearms.
There are also some visual communication issues. Many of the doors, vents, and passages that look accessible don’t really serve any purpose. Some of the obstacles look destructible but aren’t. Some of the red barrels that look Explosive™ aren’t actually Explosive™. Some of the waist-high surfaces look mountable but your knees can’t handle the imposition, as if this superhuman woman took offense at the thought of lifting. In design language, this is a problem of “possibility.” In normal human language, it’s the game not letting you do things you expect.
At its worst, this leads to entire areas becoming challenging to read. One moment that stands out is a desert pass surrounded by snipers, where the game seems to be telling you to “don’t go out into the open,” when in fact, the open space is exactly where you need to go. Phantom Fury strives for a sort of “set it and finish it” style of level design. But the endings are often unreliable, and some of your solutions simply aren’t included. I got close and shot one of these snipers through the mesh that obscured them, for example. Blood was gushing from them, they were moaning in pain, but they weren’t dying. It was like shooting a Raven.
I don’t blame the game for these stumbles. It’s the double-edged sword of making an old-school shooter that plays with player expectations. You satisfy players when they press a button and the game does something random and fun. But then they start exploring everything in every room, and the restricted nature of the world becomes obvious. As a player, when you start seeing randomly interactive objects, you start checking to see if EVERYTHING is interactive. Ultimately, we can be victims of disappointment, because video games, I often remember with shock, are not real.
Conversely, as a designer, you have to firmly establish the rules of the world while encouraging curiosity and playfulness, building a visual language in the world around what’s crucial and what’s just fluff. Phantom Fury is ambitious in this regard, but it’s a demanding magic trick to pull off. The result is a lot of laughs, a few “haha, cool!” moments, but other moments where it’s difficult to know what the game will allow. In a shooter with set pieces where creativity is encouraged, the inability to climb a waist-high ledge or shoot a man through lean fabric can be jarring.
This flow breakdown can also occur for some during puzzles where you need to stop, take a breath, and operate your head. For example, finding antlers that can be connected to a stuffed animal trophy to reveal the entrance to a secret lab when no clues to such a device have been placed beforehand. There’s also a need to employ the elderly Doom practice of mentally noting the location of keycard-locked doors, because while the levels do their best to avoid backtracking, you still often have to make that final logical leap when it comes to navigating multiple levels.
Complaints aside, when the triggerhappy setpieces work, they’re electrifying in a retro way. At one point, you call in an airstrike via a tactical map on your computer screen, staring out the window at your explosive real-time scores. BLOOD! At the end of another level, you’re escaping through the Grand Canyon in a helicopter. In another, you’re trundling through ravines in a jeep, machine-gunning pursuers and occasionally popping out to solve physics puzzles involving cranes; a long sequence reminiscent of the vehicle sections in Half-Life 2.
The train level in particular made me content and impressed. Maintaining a level of excitement in such a confined, enclosed space seems challenging to achieve (hello, Hitman 3), but this spectacular view made me think of the crowded carriages of Goldeneye 64 and train brawl Timesplitters Future Perfectall with great affection (sadly, none of them are allowed on our list of the best FPS games on PC). Speaking of which, I’m also a huge fan of the zombies here – they’re plentiful, they’re irate, and they’re not afraid to throw chairs at you like an overworked teacher who’s finally had enough of your shit.
As I said, I didn’t watch the whole thing (I have to catch real trains), but I enjoyed my time sliding around pixelated metal grates and throwing plum ba-bombs at mutants’ legs. Phantom Fury sometimes lags in the basics (and can be a bit buggy – fair warning), but its attention to detail is so commendable that I don’t care. Chekhov said that if you have a prop on stage, it has to serve a purpose in the story. Hemingway said, no, that’s bullshit, the insignificant details are crucial. Phantom’s Fury comes across as the latter; a lover of insignificant gadgets. His clocks are fully animated gifs. His cream computers make the sound of difficult drives clicking when you turn them on. And, very importantly, his toilets flush.
The review was based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.
