The wait for Duke Nukem Forever is hilarious in retrospect, but it wasn’t much fun to live through it. I remember watching the initial trailers, the later trailers, the pre-release teasers, and finally playing through the awful final product. What a ride, mostly downward.
Phantom Fury looks to be attempting to turn back the clocks to those original trailers and realize some facsimile of what Duke Nukem Forever promised to be. It’s appropriate since its predecessor, Ion Fury, sometimes feels like an alternate reality Duke Nukem 3D. And who could forget that the series’ progenitor Bombshell, was originally supposed to star the blonde crew cut?
Unfortunately, Phantom Fury doesn’t evoke the good feels of those trailers. In fact, it mostly succeeds in bringing back the bad feels, the worst of early ‘00s shooters.
Phantom Fury (PC [Reviewed], PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S)
Developer: Slipgate Ironworks
Publisher: 3D Realms
Released: April 23, 2024 (PC), May 30, 2024 (Console)
MSRP: $24.99
Phantom Fury once again returns us to the boots of Duke Nukem stand-in, Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison. She wakes up from a coma with a new robot arm slapped on and is immediately sent on a mission to recover the “Demon Core” before a mole in the GDF (Global Defense Force) does. According to promotional material, this is supposed to send her on a journey across the US, but we mostly just see military compounds in the American Southwest before landing in Chicago.
I have to get this off my chest: Phantom Fury is just so damned packed with military compounds. If you aren’t in one, you’re usually near one. There are so many grey hallways throughout its runtime that it left me gasping for air. Yet, somehow, they also manage to fit in a sewer level.
That’s not to say that Phantom Fury is without color, but its levels certainly are. While Ion Fury was maybe a bit more of a restrictive version of ‘90s key hunt shooters, Phantom Fury is much closer to Half-Life and the derivatives that followed. It’s a lot of straight corridors. It does get creative at times and has more explorable levels that loop around and are more open, but constant invisible walls and unclear objectives ensure that you’re always confined.
It’s a shame because Shelly’s arsenal is impressive. While Shelly’s triple-barreled revolver, Loverboy, was never far from my grasp, more exotic weapons get piled on over time. It’s a shame that you don’t really get much opportunity to use some of them.
Likewise, there’s an upgrade system for Shelly’s arm and weapons. However, this feature is so undercooked that I used it mostly to dump off all the nanite cores I had collected. I rarely applied weapon upgrades since they often made alterations I didn’t want. Again, it’s impressive how many different ways of dealing death that Phantom Fury has, it’s just not a very good playground for it.
The last act of the game is where you really get a chance to stretch your legs, but it seems to be a poorly cobbled-together sequence of setpieces that you can usually just sprint-slide through. Someone really lovingly put together a big version of retro-future Chicago, but it’s not well utilized. It’s like they dumped a bunch of enemies into it and left you to find the route you’re supposed to take through all the invisible walls and weird dead-ends.
The story is also not well supported by the gameplay, and the gameplay is not well supported by the story. It reaches to tell the backstory of Shelly and tie together Ion Fury and Bombshell, but can’t do much more than throw a bunch of cliches your way. It gets stuck somewhere between serious and excessive, and it even feels like the voice actors didn’t know how they should be playing it. The story beats are so predictable you could practically skip the cutscenes and fill in the blanks yourself.
Meanwhile, it’s easy to get lost in the backstory. They keep throwing around “Tempest,” which I think is a reference to 3D Realms’ upcoming RTS, Tempest Rising. However, that game is not out yet, and Tempest doesn’t really tie into the overarching plot. It’s just brought up as context for the ongoing mission. Characters and in-game emails continually bring up a war, and I don’t know if they’re talking about WWII or a yet unseen war between GDF and the Tempest. If it is explained, it’s buried under the pile of in-game emails that I just skimmed through.
It’s perhaps not that important, since the story mostly acts as vignettes between the action, but some of it is so bad that I felt revolted. I certainly like the idea of Shelly, but she hasn’t been served well by the games she’s been in.
What hurts the most about Phantom Fury is that you can tell it came from an admirable ambition, had an interesting direction, and benefited from passion in its development. Between all the missteps, frustrations, and half-cooked ideas are places where it goes the distance. Small details in the environment, places where the level design suddenly exceeds the disappointment around it, and even the feel of combat suggests a level of excitement and care completely absent in other places.
It’s likely Embracer Group’s implosion rocked its development. For the last few years, the company has issued round after round of layoffs. 3D Realms and Slipgate Ironworks were hit rather late in the cycle, which just means that throughout large periods of Phantom Fury’s development, the team would have been fearing that their studio would be next in line. Expecting anyone to stay passionate and creative at a time when their job is in jeopardy – when at any moment their hard work and effort can be taken from them – is unreasonable.
That’s just speculation; I wasn’t there. However, what Phantom Fury lacks isn’t talent. There’s a great deal of that on display; it’s just in isolated pockets within a disappointing whole. It’s not missing vision, the core concept is a tantalizing one, and there’s evidence they attempted to execute it.
But regardless of what caused the project to get derailed, it still means that Phantom Fury is a disappointing result. It’s a mash of ‘00s FPS cliches without reprieve. I spent most of its runtime wishing it was over. Or, at least, wishing it was what it promised to be. Its overall blandness has done the impossible and made me appreciate Duke Nukem Forever just a little bit more.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
