(This post was originally going to be published a few weekends ago on Kotaku. However, after it became clear that some of the devs involved in the game had some really shitty opinions of LGBT+ folks, I decided to kill it. But I wanted to share my thoughts on the game somewhere. So I created a Medium account and posted my unpublished draft here. There are probably some typos, formatting inconsistencies, or other errors. I don’t want to work on this anymore, so I’m posting like this and moving on. )
(Also, trans people deserve rights, protection, and love. )
It is wild to me that I’ve been playing a new Build engine game in 2019. But that is exactly what Ion Fury is. It’s an old-school shooter that is literally built using tools and technology from the era of Duke Nukem, Doom, and Rise Of The Triad. And while other games in the last few years have tried to emulate the style and feel of these classic shooters, like Dusk or Amid Evil, Ion Fury isn’t an imitation. It is the real deal and it is wonderful.
Ion Fury was developed by Voidpoint and published by the resurrected 3D Realms. Technically a prequel to Bombshell, a top-down shooter released in 2016, Ion Fury stars Shelly Harrison, a badass bomb disposal expert who takes on an evil scientist and his army of cyborgs. Like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, the story is not the focus. Instead, the gameplay and level design are the real stars of the show.
Even though Ion Fury is built using the old Build engine, which powered Duke Nukem and Shadow Warrior back in the 90s, the developers have been able to create some stunning levels. To be fair, this isn’t the original version of the Build engine, it is actually a modern source port of the engine. But while this new version supports modern hardware and widescreen monitors, this is still essentially that old engine with all its limitations. However, the developers use numerous tricks to create levels that are gorgeous and highly detailed. Levels that don’t feel old, but instead feel new and modern.
A great example of this is with the lighting. The Build engine doesn’t support real-time lighting or fancy shadows. But using different map sectors and coloring these different areas darker or brighter, the developers were able to create impressive shadows and colored lighting. This is very apparent in the early levels of the game, which features lots of neon and dark rooms.
These levels are also huge! Each zone is built up using multiple maps which are connected via brief, like less than a second, loading areas. This is another limit of the Build engine. However, by connecting maps together to create one massive level, the developers are able to get around this limit while also staying true to the spirit of these shooters. Each map feels connected to the previous map but different enough that I felt like I was making progress.
These large maps are also filled with secrets. I was shocked by how many I missed after finding a few. Even after spending over an hour in the first zone, I missed over half of them. I spent that not long in the levels, not because they were hard or annoying, but because I couldn’t stop exploring. If you love poking around levels, finding secrets, Easter eggs, hidden items and shortcuts, Ion Fury is the game for you.
Great looking and massive levels will only get you so far when making a shooter. You need guns, combat, and something to actually shoot in all these levels. Ion Fury has that covered. The combat in Ion Fury is fast in a way most shooters today just aren’t. This isn’t a knock on games like Call of Duty or Killzone, I enjoy those shooters too. But those games are aiming for a more cinematic feel to their action. Ion Fury instead is all about the thrill of skillful and fast combat. Like 2016’s Doom, Ion Fury forces the player to always be moving and to think about which enemies to take out first.
Ion Fury has a large roster of foes, each one challenging the player in different ways. You have more standard enemies who just shoot rifles and more deadly foes who use shotguns or grenades. Flying enemies, skull spiders, acid shooting centipedes, and crossbow-wielding snipers also appear. Each of them pushing you to use a different weapon or tactic to defeat. By mixing up enemy types and amounts, Ion Fury creates combat encounters that always kept me on my toes and feeling challenged. But beating them was rewarding and I felt like I was improving after each encounter.
The various weapons you unlock as you progress are also great and fill different roles during combat.
The starting revolver isn’t a terrible gun like Doom’s starting pistol. Instead, it can easily kill most enemies in two shots and has a secondary ability that lets you tag and pop an enemy with a small burst of bullets. This makes the revolver ideal for taking out far away targets. The shotgun, on the other hand, is the kind of close combat. It’s loud, deadly and feels great. Its secondary mode turns it into a grenade launcher, which makes it extremely useful in large encounters when you need to control the room. All the other weapons are similar, having multiple features and modes and filling different combat roles. What this ends up meaning is that every weapon is useful and I found myself switching my weapon constantly, something I don’t normally do in modern shooters.
So far, about two hours or so into Ion Fury, my only real gripe with the game is some performance issues. Which might seem hard to believe. You might be thinking something like “Wow, get a better computer! You can’t run the Duke Nukem engine.” But while this is an old engine, it is being pushed hard to create Ion Fury. And in some areas of the game, I ran into framerate issues. I mostly got rid of these by messing with the settings, but I still felt like my mouse was a bit laggy at times. Others have reported similar issues, so hopefully, these small hiccups can be ironed out in a future patch.
If the rest of Ion Fury is even half as good as the first zones, then this might be one of my favorite shooters I’ve played in years. It feels and looks unlike any modern shooter and reminds me of when I was younger. Back when I would download shareware versions of old shooters, like Doom, and play each level for hours. Exploring every inch of each area of secrets. It might seem strange, but Ion Fury and its decades-old engine is easily one of the best things I’ve played this year.
