Ion Fury (2019)

This title is a love letter to classic ’90s first-person shooters, built on a modernized version of the old Build engine that powered Duke Nukem 3D and Blood. It captures the speed, intensity, and charm of that era, with fast-paced combat, non-regenerating health, creative weapons with alternate fire modes, and sprawling levels filled with secrets to uncover. It is impressive how this engine can achieve to create such diverse games, while still feeling modern enough to support indie developers with unique ideas, not to mention it is still powering a lot of mods being made for existing games, which sometimes become their own thing.

The level design stands out in particular, offering large, detailed spaces that reward exploration and make firefights feel dynamic and unpredictable. The presentation leans into retro style without feeling outdated. Pixelated visuals are enhanced with modern lighting effects and small interactive touches, giving each stage a lot of personality. The sound design, from punchy weapon effects to a fitting soundtrack, complements the chaotic action and keeps the adrenaline high, this is truly one of the most stylish titles that I've ever experienced.

That said, Ion Fury doesn’t try to push the genre forward. Its narrative is paper-thin, mostly an excuse to throw waves of enemies at the player, and the environments can start to feel repetitive after a while. Overall, Ion Fury succeeds at what it sets out to do: delivering a faithful, exciting throwback to the golden age of shooters. For fans of old-school FPS design, it’s a thrilling ride filled with satisfying action and nostalgic charm, though those looking for innovation or a strong story may find it a little lacking. This is truly one of the best oldschool shooters that I've experienced, I highly recommend not skipping it if you like this sub-genre.

OVERALL SCORE = ★★★★★ (4.5 ★s)

__gameplay _ ★★★★★
___ design ___ ★★★★☆
____ fun _____ ★★★★★
__ graphics __ ★★★★☆
___ sound ___ ★★★★☆

One of the best boomer shooters out there. Feels like a spiritual successor to Duke Nukem 3D. Weapon designs are great and feel satisfying. Level designs push the Build Engine to it's limits, though I did get lost a few times. Overall design is very fun, some of the best fun I've had with a boomer shooter. Graphically it's the best looking Build Engine game for sure. I would have personally liked to see some more modern graphical features and lighting, like in Prodeus for example, but that's personal preference. The soundtrack is pulsing electronica with some symphonic sound mixed in here and there. Pretty great stuff, if a little forgettable. The one thing to note about this game is it's on the hard side. Consider Normal to = Hard. Enemies are plentiful and pretty aggressive, and if you aren't careful you can run out of ammo and have to scour the level to find more. It's not as bad as, say, a survival horror game, but it's definitely a bit more challenging than Normal in most other boomer shooters so it's worth mentioning.

In Summary: Ion Fury is one of my top 5 favorite boomer shooters of all time. Highly recommended if you love Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, or just boomer shooters in general.

Pros

• It looks like and plays like a game from the mid-90s shooter.
• There are many references and easter eggs
• A fun dialogue from the female protagonist.
• It's fast-paced action and challenging
• The gameplay is solid
• Interesting level designs

Cons

• Fight the same enemies throughout most of the game
• It does become a bit of a slog towards the end

An excellent retro shooter and a loving throwback to classic 90’s Build engine games like Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, Redneck Rampage, and Blood.

As Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison you must take out the evil Dr Heskel and his cyborg cultists who are destroying Neo D.C.

It’s a typical 90’s shooter: minimal story to get in the way of you gunning down anything that moves, catchy soundtrack, hefty guns, big sprawling levels with heaps of hidden areas, and a bad-ass protagonist spouting crude jokes and action movie/video game/TV show one-liners.

The only real downsides are that there isn’t much weapon variety and there aren’t that many enemy types. These are only minor problems and they didn’t get in the way of a great game.

First Impressions - Ion Fury

It's.... good? Judging simply by first impressions I had a better time with it than Amid Evil. Ion Fury has much better use of enemy prioritization and ammo resource management is more key here. I played on the second hardest difficulty (which is generally how i prefer retro fps). I think the biggest thing keeping the game back is the level design. It's too open, it goes hard on wide areas with huge ambushes but the game is strongly hitscan focused, which doesn't work with these kind of levels. It encourages stop and pop shooting from around corners rather than intricate weaving between cover points. Had it been stylized like FEAR it would probably much much better for it.

But in terms of positives I really liked the weapons, except for the bombs which feel like a "fuck this encounter in particular" weapon rather than something with any skilled variable use. The revolver with dead eye is satisfying as hell to utilize, and the 'shotgun' and smg equivalent are all great fun. There's also a few circumstances I saw where there were multiple routes within a singular encounter for you to weave down the corridors of but they still run into the issue i covered on hitscan.

It's no DUSK or Quake, or even Blood for that matter. But it's good and I'll probably get around to finishing it at some point but at the moment it's going to the shelf.

This is how you make an apology.

"Members of Voidpoint’s Ion Fury team have made sexist and transphobic comments, and included homophobic language in Ion Fury. We recognize these statements are insensitive, unacceptable, and counterproductive to causes of equality. We unequivocally apologize both for these comments and language as well as for any pain they have caused the gaming community, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community. We take full responsibility for any damage that has been done to the relationships we’ve worked so hard to build.

“Moving forward, Voidpoint will institute a zero-tolerance policy for this type of language and all employees and contractors will undergo mandatory sensitivity training. As part of our efforts to contribute to the work that must be done to further support these communities, we are donating $10,000 from Ion Fury’s release day proceeds to The Trevor Project. We are also patching Ion Fury ASAP to remove all unacceptable language.”

https://www.gameinformer.com/2019/08/19/after-transphobic-comments-spark-controversy-ion-fury-developers-apologize-for-employee