ION Fury delivers some good old fashioned FPS gameplay. Sadly it also brings some issues that games from that era were known for. Maybe asking that a game combine the best of the old and new eras of games is too much to ask but I will do so anyway. That being said I still enjoyed myself for the most part, the good outweighs the bad.
The gameplay itself was fun and brought me back to when shooters didn’t have classes, small amounts of weapon limits, chest high walls and QTEs. Just you, your enemies and your creativity to experiment with your arsenal finding the best ways to dispatch the wide range of enemies you will face. Shooting is satisfying and the different weapons all have their own feel. The story is......well it’s there....kind of. There are no cut scenes which is fine as a story can be told in many different ways but my issue is that ION Fury doesn’t really tell the story in any way. There is a general synopsis available at the main menu area but that’s about it. You don’t get told where you are going, why you are doing anything or what your goals are. You just go throughout the levels and kill enemies while trying to make it to the end of the level. This may not bother some but there are plenty of games that merge a great story with top notch gameplay so I can hope for a better balance. F.E.A.R.; Max Payne; Far Cry; Crysis; Doom 3; etc all deliver on both fronts. The level design also falls short. I’m not one who requires a giant arrow pointing me where to go but ION Fury was more like a maze where I would keep walking around trying to see where I haven’t gone yet trying to find where to go. The levels having next to no context as to why I was there didn’t help. The graphics are what they are. A retro throw back. There isn’t much to say other than while they were no means top notch they did a better job having variety than many newer games do. There was an actual colour palette which included more than browns. The soundtrack was well done and kept the tempo high. The voice acting was well done for the over the top style although the one liners got repetitive quickly.
I played ION Fury on Linux. It never crashed on me at all. It was missing a library that caused the game to crash at launch. I will give the developers credit in that they mentioned this on the main page for GOG so you knew about it before you bought the game. The library is SDL2-Mixer-2.0-0 and it isn’t hard to install. On Manjaro I simply had to open the package manager and search this library and click install to solve the issue. I could also install it through terminal had I wished. After that the game launched just fine. During play my total GPU usage was 6-18%; my VRAM usage was 846MB-2.22GB; my CPU usage was 9-10%; my system RAM usage was 2-2.3GB. The game ran at a constant 144FPS. There were no graphics options at all to adjust. There was an FOV slider that went from 70-120. Alt-Tab worked. There was a manual save option where you could quick save or manual save whenever you wanted. The quick saves worked strangely though as they would overwrite your most recent save rather than create a new save each time. The game does have a built in auto save checkpoint system if you would rather just use that. The game uses just 97.4MB of disk space. It uses the Build engine. You can’t change the difficulty level after starting the game. I used version 1.02 from GOG.
If you just want state of the art bang bang then look no further. The gameplay was fun and enjoyable. The story and level design was poor but I feel many won’t care. I paid $20 CAD for ION Fury and feel that is a fair price. I finished the game in around 7 or 8 hours. The game doesn’t keep track and i’m guessing.
My Score: 7/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.3.2 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.1.5 | Mate 1.22.3 | Kernel 5.4.14-2-MANJARO