Fury Unleashed Review | When chilling out doesn't work
The explosion of procedural generated games is not a phenomenon that needs an introduction. People like to make games with variable levels and many other people like to play them.
Fury unleashed is one of these titles and I wanted to see what it offered that others don't.
Aesthetics
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Exploring the hallways of an alien ship |
The 2d graphics have been drawn with a style reminiscent of a comic book, the sprites have very vibrant colors, the characters have quite exaggerated figures and everything looks cartoony.
The effect is nice, but it can be detrimental in some fringe cases.
Sometimes it's hard to see the particle details, especially the projectile of the enemies, they tend to blur with scenery, making it a bit frustrating dealing with encounters that use a lot of ranged attacks.
Anyway, moving onto the animations, they are made using a kind of puppetry technique, you can almost see which parts of the body are the junctions used to move the other rigid parts, but it didn't bother me since the illusion of movement is kept thanks to the fast pace nature of the game.
Small tangent on the voice acting, or rather the lack of it since nothing is voiced, at best some there are grunts when Fury gets hit.
On the other hand, the soundtrack is fine and it's also a bit modular based on your skill level: the better you play, the more it gets hectic and vibrant. Not a bad choice at all, it stimulated me to play good so I could hear more of it.
The sounds design is really nice too, meaty, impactful, the weapons puck a punch and overall it's pleasant to the ears.
Summarizing, ok visual department, good usage of music and sounds except for the lack of voices.
Game Mechanics
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Just an average day of fighting a helicopter with a plasma rifle, nothing unusual |
The game is a platformer shooter with procedurally generated levels. The main goal of each stage it to reach the end located in a panel at the most right side of the page. To achieve this you have at your disposition weapons, grenades and special abilities in combination with your run-of-the-mill platforming skills.
A bit more in-depth look at your starting capabilities.
Your abilities at the start of any run consists in: shooting with a predetermined gun, use melee attacks when close, stomp on enemies by pressing down, grenades and a special ability. Stomping and the special ability are the two least clear, so let me explain them. To stomp an enemy, you must jump over them and press the down button in midair, this is going to make Fury fall fast and instantly kill the one enemy right under him. It's a very strong move, but it needs to be used wisely, since it's likely that the enemy is going to take at least a shot and hit you, possibly bringing you to a losing side of an attrition war if you decide to stomp on any enemy you see, especially if one has spikes making them damage you if you stomp on them. Special abilities are activated by pressing the F key, they have many variants with their one use cases, like one that can freeze the enemies or another one that drops a support drone. To recharge them, you need to kill a certain amount of enemies.
The tool-set given is well varied, allowing a good degree of customization on how one may want to tackle the challenges of the game.
During a run, you are going to earn new weapons and abilities, plus pieces of armor that can prevent some damage and grant some useful passive effects, like raising the chance of life orbs spawning when low on health. Some challenges even allow you to change your starting load-out (I am going to talk about this later).
Of course, some of this new equipment needs to be bought.
The economy consists of 2 elements: black ink and golden ink. Black ink is like experience points in other games, as such, when you have gathered enough of it your character levels up and you get a point to use in the upgrades' menu. Golden Ink is used to buy items plus services, it's non-cumulative and temporary, meaning that if you die you lose all the unspent golden ink. Nothing wrong or particularly cool here.
Let's talk about something a bit more uncommon.
Some interesting mechanics are: customization of looks and load-out, unlockable upgrades and make combo kills. Customization allows you to change the aspect of Fury, which has no effect on his fighting capabilities. The load-out can be modified based on the unlocks you manage to do during a run, you can change your starting gun and your melee weapon. As stated before, the upgrades can be unlocked once gathered enough ink and being granted a point. The upgrades have a tree-like structure, meaning that if you want to unlock a particular upgrade, you must unlock the precedent one first. If you kill enough enemies without being hit, you start a combo which grants you some benefits, like more ink or even a shield if unlocked in the upgrades' menu.
Everything here is fine, even if it may result a bit grindy trying to unlock everything.
But what exactly you need to do, aside from mowing a constantly increasing number of enemies, to finish the game?
Apart from the usual get at the end of a level to beat it objective, you are going to face some secondary challenges, such as performing a perfect combo or surpass small platforming challenges without taking any damage. These challenges allow you to unlock new gear that can be bought or even added as an option to your starting load-out. Not the most varied of quests, but good enough to keep things interesting.
Saving system wise, there isn't anything worth talking, the game can save and quit almost anywhere except for the boss-fights, in them you can only quit and lose all of your progress.
Due to its procedural nature, the levels don't tend to have a defined structure except for the overall theme of the comic book you are in and the environmental hazards connected to it.
They are varied enough, but to be honest I got a bit bored by the repetition of some sections during the end.
What is a level without enemies to fight though?
The minions are fairly standard for this genre of game, some are ranged, some like to get close and personal, others explode when they die, the usual. The boss-fights, both primary and secondary, are well done, they pose a good challenge without feeling cheap. Plus, there are also tertiary bosses who are simply buffed up versions of regular minions and can't be immediately killed by stomping.
Nothing too much unique, but also nothing broken.
About the general challenge and/or modifiers...
At the start, there are 2 difficulties available: easy and hard. After beating the game on hard, incredible gets unlocked and if you beat the game on that, legendary unlocks. The main difference between the first two is on the leader-board and achievements: if you play on easy, your score won't be present on the leader-board and some achievements can't be unlocked. Incredible is a bit more interesting: instead of using the perks you have unlocked during a normal play-through, you get to choose on a selection of 3 random perks every time you beat a level and you lose all of them if you die. Legendary is even more insane since you have to beat the game without using any kind of perk. There are also 2 extra modes based on SUPERHOT and Crypt of the NecroDancer, each one modifying the game rules to give an experience similar to the ones you can find in these games, but in the engine of Fury.
These difficulty selectors and modes are very varied, definitely giving you a lot of choice on how you want to tackle the game.
Playing on hard, it took me 8 hours to beat the game.
In short, I think everything is balanced enough, I always thought that the challenge was fair and never felt screwed by the RNG thanks to the fine-tuning of the mechanics.
Narrative
Story bits will be found at the end of some chapters and can be revisited in the menu
Story bits will be found at the end of some chapters and can be revisited in the menu
The story is quite unorthodox: instead of focusing on the adventures of the comic book protagonist Fury, it focuses on the personal struggles of the Author, the creator of Fury. This is made clear almost immediately by mister Doodle, a spirit who through the "monolith of revelation" shows us messages of the Author between him and his acquaintances or online discussions about his works. In particular, Doodle shows us how the author is starting to lose interest in his products, both because he starts to believe that making comics is not an important job and because of the negative reception around the latest issues of Fury.
The narrative frame is fine, I think it did a decent job at setting up the tension and the reward at the end was enough, it fitted well with the premise.
Because of this peculiar narrative and the way is presented, the game doesn't have any kind of actual story or characters in any conceivable way. As such, the narrative of this game is not going to appease someone who enjoys stories driven by characters and world-building.
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