Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison has had a tough road trying to be a badass 90’s-style hero. She’s got all the tools she needs to stand alongside the greats minus the baggage of a Duke Nukem or Lo Wang, but it never works out as planned. Shelly’s arsenal has some excellent weapons in it and her bionic arm provides good combat and environmental interactivity options, and while her personality is brusque, it doesn’t have the callousness that made the ’90s anti-heroes more crude than they needed to be. The character work is done, but the games have yet to land as they should. Shelly’s latest adventure isPhantom Fury, a soft reset for the series that trades the early-90s all-action ofIon Furyfor something a bit more in the vein ofHalf-Lifeand other late-90s shooters.
A 90s throwback from a different part of the decade
Phantom Furyopens with Shelly being woken from an artificial coma and everything falling apart around her ears. There’s no time to explain, bad things are happening and it’s time to get moving, and the one directive is to not kill any innocents along the way. Fortunately there are hardly any of those so everyone is fair game, whether that be the military or the zombie-like creatures they’re fighting. Things have obviously gone horribly wrong and once out of the compound, Shelly starts on a road trip across the United States tearing through everyone in her way while tracking down the Demon’s Core that’s at the heart of chaos.
Ion Maiden Changes Name to Ion Fury
It’s a great setup for an action-adventure that’s let down byPhantom Furyclearly not being done yet. For every system that works there’s one that doesn’t, and I eventually lost track of the bugs and instead just worked around them. For example, one of the main features is that most things are upgradeable using the purple nanites found hidden throughout the levels. Weapons, Shelly’s robo-arm and eventually the special Ion suit all have their own abilities, and whether you want to trade a little damage on the Stinger’s rockets for an incendiary effect or not can be a tough call. Pistol bullets, on the other hand, are common enough that there’s no worry about wastage, so buying the small-burst upgrade for it that fires off three rounds per trigger-pull is a no-brainer. And then I bought the alt-fire ability for the pistol, which shoots out a taser round, and the three-shot primary fire was never seen again. For that matter, the alt-fire stops working now and then too, with no clear pattern I could ever figure out as to why it comes and goes.
There are, thankfully, many more weapons than just the pistol, each with varying levels of usefulness and few feeling like they’re strong enough to properly handle the enemies in later levels. The enemies aren’t all that smart, but they are fast and fire quickly, and when there’s half a dozen or more shooting back it doesn’t matter that only a couple of them are in heavy armor; Shelly’s health gets whittled down at an alarmingly quick pace. There are more than a few sections in the game where the odds of surviving without reloading to the last checkpoint is basically nonexistent, but once you know a heavy is going to pop out from behind a box that from further down the corridor looks clear, you can cover the corridor in electric gel then roll a bowling bomb down the way to soften up the approach. It would be nice to just be able to splat any surprises with the triple-barreled shotgun, but the big guys will soak up that damage for at least one blast and the reload is slow enough they can take off a major chunk of health before going down.
Big guns, little effect
Other areas also suffer from the enemy speed, like a confrontation that should put the sniper bow to good use except its bolts tend to get hung up on the chain link fence everyone is behind while the cover system has two options: stand behind boxes unable to see anything or stand slightly exposed and take damage. The trick is to fire quickly and accurately enough to minimize the health loss, but accept that you’ll need to find a health pack or two to survive the next encounter. There’s a difference between annoying and honestly hard andPhantom Furytends to fall on the wrong side too often.
What the game does get right, though, is an arsenal that’s fun to use and nicely varied level design. While the guns don’t feel as powerful as it seems like they should, the upgrades you can equip them with can be all kinds of entertaining. The gel gun doesn’t start off with electric foam but, once you’ve bought it, can electrify an enemy’s approach to the point that a few pistol shots are all you need. Shelly’s signature revolver Loverboy is a go-to weapon throughout the game thanks to its secondary fire mode, where you hold down the alt-fire to tag an enemy and let go to plug bullets into them, usually until they’re quickly dead. Even the shotgun has a great upgrade in the form of a flash, which stuns close-range enemies and leaves them open to attack. The purple upgrade-nanites are found in all sorts of out-of-the-way places, and whilePhantom Furydoesn’t pop up a “secret found!” notification, you know you’ve succeeded when you find one.
There’s plenty of time for searching too. Once the enemies are cleared out they’re gone, and the flow of the game is set up so that there’s usually more time spent trying to solve how to get to the next area than in combat. The problem with that isPhantom Furyis willing for you to be lost with no hint as to what’s next. Key cards and other pickups glow, but so do a lot of other things in the environment, so it’s easy to overlook them. In one particular area you need to drop down into a fiery yellow hole, right after watching robots get incinerated elsewhere in smaller but similar disposal chutes that clearly sent a message of “Don’t do that!” There’s always a tip on the screen, “Get to the (place)”, and solving how to do it should be rewarding, but as often as not there’s an item that looks like part of the background but turns out to be necessary for progression.
Closing Comments:
Phantom Furysimply doesn’t feel like it’s ready yet, with too many bugs and nowhere near enough polish to become the game that it could be. Too many encounters are designed to only be beatable once you memorize enemy placement and a giant-mech boss shouldn’t be an easier, more enjoyable encounter than a handful of guys in a hallway. Bugs are also abound, with enemies zipping between cover points while stuck in the kneeling position, music that you can almost hear playing in the background despite the volume being maxed out, or getting trapped in an elevator when its doors won’t open. “Reset to checkpoint” is always an option, but in this case it was an open service elevator, and while sticking to the ’90s/early-2000s gameplay convention of a hero who can’t hop over a waist-high obstacle is authentic, it’s the wrong kind of authenticity. Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison has the potential to be a great 90s throwback character, butPhantom Furyis nowhere near what’s needed to see her reach her potential.
Phantom Fury
Version Reviewed: PC
