Fury – PC – Review

The idea seemed pretty good on
paper, a person-versus-person action titled totally devoted to an online
experience. Factor in the decidedly sword and sorcery era of action and
goodness me, we have ourselves the making of an underground action hit. But
then the final product came out and everything we had hoped Fury would be,
wasn’t.

I think the good folks at Auran
studios bit off more then they could chew. Fury is a game that should have
been kept a bit more simple than its end product. And initially it is. The
game is pretty much devoid of any sort of quest or background story; oh sure,
there is the ominous voice-over in the beginning of the game, but if you are
here to slay dragons and rescue towns from oppression, then I am sorry to say
you barked up the wrong tree. Instead, Fury involves you creating a character
from one of the type sets. From there, you roam the lobby speaking with NPCs
who can help you with weapons and armor and any number of the 16 skills that
can be assigned. Now, right there, is where you should be concerned, I’ll say
it again 16 skills. Now if this isn’t clicking with
you, you must understand that the game is a furious (get it, Fury) exercise
in real-time combat. You join into any one of the open rooms and go at it
tooth and nail in a non-stop battle royale. Now I’ll say it again
16 skills, sixteen skills is way too many abilities to use when
you are trying to fight, jump run, dodge and kill. In other words, the game
provided too many skills considering several of them are just variances on the
same theme, One skill makes your attacks 11% more effective while another
makes it 15% more effective (not really the actual numbers, but you get what I
mean). The developers made it too darn specific when they needed to keep it to
say, six or seven skills.

"Swan Lake, WWE style!"

To add to this mess, Fury suffers
from another major gameplay setback; too much information on the screen at any
given time. If you are running around fighting your enemies, you are inundated
with information. Icons at the top of the screen, a legend at the bottom,
up-to-date information occurring in the middle of the screen, text boxes on
the right and bottom and information above the heads of your quarry. It is way
too much for any action player to absorb much less use if you are trying to do
battle. There is an option to take all of that away, but in doing so, you do
lose the critical info you need to see during play. It’s a catch 22; on one
hand you lose 40% visiblity of the screen, on the other hand you aren’t
alerted when something important happens during a match.

In Fury, you can play three
different styles of action. There is a straight up deathmatch mode, a
team-based deathmatch mode (best of 3 series) and a capture the flag mode.
Since this game is an online game in the truest sense, you would think that
there is tons of online action occurring at any given time. Well, that’s
simply not the case. Since you must wait for the appropriate amount of people
this can be frustrating. Of course, as you roam the enormous staging area, you
can group up with people to help avoid such problems, but more often than not,
you are waiting. Not what you want in your all-out, online action title.
Winning a battle allows you a convuluted way to cash in on your spoils. NPCs
are available in the lobby to buy and sell the equipment you happen to acquire
after battles. The game has an essence style of leveling up to improve your
statistics. It’s nothing new aside from name – you have seen and done this
sort of thing in better titles.

"Fury, the feel-good family game
of the season… ehhhh no."

Now being a game reviewer requires
me to have a fairly beefy system to play these fancy new games I get every so
often. Fury, has some issues. The game box proudly claims it is based off of
the Unreal 3 engine and that should make some players quite happy considering
the recent games that have experienced success on this very engine (Bioshock
anyone, anyone). But whatever love that started in making this game quickly
turned to disdain. The game has multiple clipping issues even with the setting
dialed down as low as they could go, and I shouldn’t have to do that with a
monster graphics card. There is random lock-ups and the occasional mute and
frozen NPC (when it shouldn’t). The point is that the actual in-game graphics
and action are very low quality. I even had games where I arrived DOA before I
could even play, what’s up with that? The lighting effects and textures
managed to get the job done when things were rolling along correctly, but –
and I can honestly say this – the game simply does not belong in the current
crop of games being released.

The same could be said about the
sound effects. Very ineffectual and thin sounding. No meat and potatos in this
title, just a synthesizer soundtrack recorded in someone’s basement and voice
over’s that make you laugh unintentionally.

Now, in case I haven’t made it
clear you use both melee weapons and spell casting in your combat, along with
some hand-to-hand combat. I initially had thought that maybe this title would
be the anti-Shadowrun game, with more adept abilities and smooth action. In
retrospect, this title is no where as good as Shadowrun, and I didn’t think
Shadowrun was all that great. While in the action, it helps to use the lock-on
feature to get a better chance of actually hitting your opponent, but with all
of the crud scattered around the different arenas, the lock-on feature becomes
a hinderance as it gets you caught up in the objects and walls of the arena.

Gameplay: 4.8
The game wants to be an all-out action extravaganza, when in reality
the end product is full of technical issues and poor gameplay.

Graphics: 5.0
Admittedly there is a couple of
cool visuals in there, but the lag and freeze ups along with the uninspired
character models drop this game down, way down.

Sound: 4.2
The voice overs, as few as they
are, stink. An ominous tone that really doesn’t make anything ominous. Thin
sounding explosions and thinly veiled sound effects don’t bring anything to
the table.

Difficulty: Medium/Hard
This title is difficult merely
because the technical shortcomings and lack of competition online really
unfairly make it harder then it should be. It should be easy to go online and
battle – it isn’t.

Concept: 5.0
Again, the similarities to
Shadowrun are there, it’s just the gameplay, graphics, online shortcomings and
overall experience fail to ellicit any real praise.

Multiplayer: 4.7
A very uneven and poor online experience. Players who have been
playing already are not real keen on newcomers; that is, if you can actually
find a game that is free of lag and other online issues. Thankfully there is
no fee to pay online.

Overall: 4.6
Wow, I had such high hopes for
this title, sadly it fails on literally every front.