Phantom Fury Review

I heard a lot of bad things about Phantom Fury before I jumped into it, I also didn't like from what I played of Wrath Aeon of Ruin which was also published by 3D Realms and as a result, I was very hesistant to play Phantom Fury at all. I thought I was going to play it for a few hours and then drop it but I didn't, I actually got to the end which surprised me.

However the more I started play Phantom Fury, the more it started to warm up to me, fact of the matter is the last Half Life game that even got released was a VR title and I don't have access to that so Phantom Fury doing a decent enough job at scratching this itch is going to make me softer on it even though the game has a lot of issues.

I'll start with issues you will notice right away, the game is a mess on a technical level, physics can be unpolished, dialogue during cutscenes might not always play when they are supposed to, I had one moment where an enemy was firing at me while a cutscene was playing, the UI is a complete mess and it took me forever to figure out how selecting things in both the upgrade and options menu works(you have to move the cursor at least 2-4 if not 5 times for the selection to register), you have to press the grab button multiple times just to pick something up, the game might not remember your last selected weapon especially when getting out of vehicles(there is only one of these sections the whole game) and these are just some of the things you might encounter when playing not involving moment to moment gameplay.

With that out of the way, I'll start with what I liked and by far the biggest star of the show is just how much Phantom Fury does such a good at mostly scratching that Half Life itch I mentioned earlier, there's a lot and I mean A LOT of Doom, Quake and Serious Sam style indie shooters but there isn't much in the way of stuff inspired by HL. In a lot of ways when playing PF, I was reminded all over again what made the Half Life series special and what sets them apart from the above mentioned games and that is the journey and how the game contextualizes that said journey. PF and by extension HL both don't have amazing stories(more so in PF's case since the characters are just there and the over arching plot is thin at best), but what made them both stand out is that you are given a reason as to why you are shooting and why you are doing the things you are doing in the various levels. In Doom and Quake, you see a text crawl, kill enemies, collect keycards, then get to level exit, in Serious Sam just shoot hordes and watch an occasional cutscene, in PF and HL, you are given objectives and clear goals on what you have to do to get to the level exit. It's not vague, you are given a clear goal and enough as to why you need to get to the end of a level.

That can require you to do a wide number of things like collect items, use cranes, solve puzzles, use computers to activate parts of the enviroment, finding codes to open doors, blowing areas using explosives using items to get furthur into a level and much more all all though PF has first person cutscenes, they are minimal, load times are also minimal too, mostly keeping that sense of continuity of going on this long epic journey, the fact that enviroments are much bigger and levels take longer to complete than the aforementioned games gives the game the sense of an adventure. HL2 does it the best, but Phantom Fury does a such a solid job at emulating the formula that I commend the game for it. There are some weak levels like, Los Alamos Research Facility and Retrive Demon Core but I'd say the level design scratches that HL itch 90% of the time. Some great levels include White Sands Facility and Chicago Under Fire.

Final positive is that the game checkpoints really well, I thought it was going to have a save anywhere system but the game uses checkpoint and the game does autosave and checkpoint quite frequently which is good because there can be some cheap deaths from time to time. 

The weapons in terms of feel are fine but some sound better than others like how the Lover Boy and Flak Cannon sound better than the default shotgun and the base pistol. Damage animations also feel good and are very punchy which is great, this now leads to my next issue and this is a big one. 

The enemy roster is weak, like pathetically weak. You mainly just fight the same hitscan enemies and zombies for probably 95% of the game, the game might throw in some cloaked ninjas, helicoptors, tanks, and some jumping zombies but make no mistake, much of the fire fights feel samey. The AI is really bad, they have no sense of preservation and will often just charge at you and move around with no sense of tactics at all. On top of this, you get so many guns more than the game has enemies so most the of time especially later on in the game you will become an unstoppable powerhouse due to how little enemy variety there is and how your arsenal gets bigger and bigger with not enough growing oppositon to compensate.

Also, I dislike the health system since partially regen health is an upgrade, no holding medkits and enemies don't drop much health on top of combat being hitscan making damage hard to avoid. As a result, I played one easy, but I felt like I should've raised it to normal when I got more weapons but by that point, I just wanted to take the option where I took the most damage since playing hitscan games where you are a tank and can't regen parts of your health, hold medkits or enemies dropping health gave me all the more reason to. Why was partially regenerating a suit upgrade? Why? 

Overall, this is a good game but very rough, but if you can get past it's many rough edges there is a solid enough indie FPS shooter that is a breath of fresh of air from the stuff coming out now.