Phantom Fury

My first hours with Phantom Fury felt like unearthing a time capsule that someone had packed in a hurry. Slipgate Ironworks made a deliberate pivot away from the Build Engine spritelore of Ion Fury and landed somewhere closer to the era of Half-Life and early Halo: low-poly world geometry, in-engine cutscenes, a linear campaign stitched together into one largely unbroken run, and a heavy emphasis on environmental interactivity that the game never quite earns. Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison wakes from a coma with a new bionic arm and a mission to recover something called the Demon Core before a mole inside the Global Defense Force does. The setup is purposefully thin, which is fine. The problem is the game keeps interrupting its best quality - the actual shooting - to ask you to stack crates, scan faux emails off monochromatic monitors, and hunt for colored-key equivalents in corridors that lack any in-game map to orient you. When the gunfights click, they genuinely click. Shelly's arsenal is the standout feature: the triple-barreled Loverboy revolver sits at the center of the loadout, and more exotic hardware accumulates over time. Combat has satisfying crunch to it, and health scarcity on harder settings keeps engagements tense rather than breezy. Weapon upgrades exist via a nanite core system, but the implementation feels half-finished. You commit to an upgrade at a GDF upgrade station and cannot revert it without finding another station, and you cannot simply strip a weapon back to default if neither branch suits you. It is the kind of friction that feels like a design note that never got a final pass. Vehicle sections break up the on-foot pacing in ways that range from fun (a helicopter sequence with gatling fire and missiles, even if it is on rails) to functional (driving sequences across the American Southwest). There are also playable in-world minigames at bars and arcades, including a light-gun cabinet called "Phantom Killer" that is a small, genuinely charming detail. The level design is where the game earns most of its mixed reception. The first few hours are quite linear and corridor-heavy, with an overabundance of grey military compounds that critics and players alike flagged as visually monotonous. Later stages open up into more sprawling layouts that loop back on themselves, but without a map, backtracking becomes guesswork. The checkpoint save system compounds this: checkpoints can sit ten or more minutes apart, meaning a stray explosive barrel can erase a substantial chunk of hard-won progress. Enemy AI is inconsistent, and at launch the game shipped with enough bugs that many early reviewers docked it significantly. Post-launch patches addressed a number of these issues, and the current state of the game is meaningfully more stable than what critics encountered in April 2024. The honest read on Phantom Fury is that it carries real ambition and scattered moments of genuine craft, surrounded by design decisions that were either left undercooked or shipped before they were ready. The pixel-art aesthetic is its own quiet charm: Unreal 4 dressed up to look like a sharper, wider-aspect-ratio version of late-90s PC graphics. There is care in the small environmental details, in the way a dive bar early in the game has a playable pinball table and a dartboard, in the way some arenas suddenly exceed the disappointment around them. But that same care is absent in the weapon wheel, the waypoint system, and the AI. If you loved Ion Fury and expect a direct continuation of that tightly tuned experience, the shift in style will take adjustment. If you can meet the game on its own terms - a scrappy, imperfect love letter to the Quake II and Half-Life era, one that stumbles more than its predecessor but still lands its punches often enough - there is something worth having here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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