A helicopter will soon join the fray.
And, hey, singing is hard.
But there’s no pre-requisite to understand the story of the predecessor here.
This arm is the beasty melee button that is, admittedly, a little underutilized outside of combat.
It can turn an enemy to chunks, with a short cooldown.
The bathrooms are a particular ode to old-school detail.
Counter to expectation, it does.
I haven’t completed the game, but almost every level has some new silliness to it.
But holepoke I must.
What took me more getting used to was the enemy movement.
While flying drones pester you with agile hovering.
And the hardiness of some later enemies undermines the otherwise crackling firearm feedback.
There’s also some visual communication snafus.
Many doors, vents and passageways that look as if they’re accessible don’t really serve a purpose.
Some obstructions look pummelable but are not.
Some reddish barrels that look ExplosiveTM are not really ExplosiveTM.
In design vernacular this is an “affordances” issue.
At its worst moments this leads to whole areas becoming hard to read.
Phantom Fury is going for a kind of “set up and payoff” style of level design.
But the payoffs are often unreliable and some of your solutions are simply not accounted for.
I got close and hit one of these snipers through the mesh that obscured them, for example.
The blood flew out of them, they grunted in pain, but would not die.
It was like shooting The Crow.
I don’t fault the game too hard for these mis-steps.
It is the double-edged sword of building an old-school shooter that toys with player expectations.
You’ll kindly players when they press a button and it does something incidental and fun.
But then they start investigating everything in every room, and the limited nature of the world becomes apparent.
As a player, once you start seeing incidentally interactive objects, you start checking if EVERYTHING is interactive.
Phantom Fury is ambitious in this regard, but it’s a demanding magic trick to pull off.
The effect is that you get a lot of laughs, some moments of “haha, neat!”
yet other moments in which it’s difficult to know what the game is going to permit.
Complaints aside, when the triggerhappy setpieces work they are exciting in a retro way.
At the end of another level you escape in a helicopter through the grand canyon.
The train level had me particularly happy and impressed.
Hemmingway said, nah, that’s bollocks, inconsequential details are important.
Phantom’s Fury feels like the latter; a devotee of inconsequential gizmos.
Its clocks are fully animated gif timepieces.
Its cream-coloured PCs make clicking hard drive noises when you switch them on.
And, very importantly, its toilets flush.
This review was based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.
