Reviews
[Review] ‘Ion Fury’ Fails as a Parody, But Excels as a Shooter
The shooting is good in Ion Fury.
More specifically, the pistol is good. That’s right: the weapon you ignore the second you get anything else is really, really good. So good, in fact, that I used it extensively throughout the game and leaned on it heavily in the final boss fight.
The developers at Voidpoint transformed the humble pistol from a packet of ramen noodles (undesirable, but will eat in a pinch) into a jumbo bag of Totino’s Pizza Rolls (an essential staple of every diet, will eat three meals a day) with the addition of a simple alternate fire mode.
That isn’t unique to the pistol; most of the weapons in this retro shooter have two distinct modes. The shotgun becomes a grenade launcher. You can throw Bowling Bombs unlit for explosions on impact or you can light the fuse for a timed combustion. The Ion Bow, which ordinarily stuns and damages enemies, fires a wide shot in alt-fire and becomes an uncontrollable plasma machine gun when you hold the right mouse button.
But, the pistol’s alternate fire option allows you to paint targets on multiple enemies — think Arthur Morgan’s Deadeye ability in Red Dead Redemption 2 — locking on, and firing on all of them at once. It’s a supremely useful addition that makes the pistol a surprisingly essential weapon. It’s the best tool for crowd control when a horde of low-level enemies are on your heels and it’s fantastic for taking out bouncy anklebiter spiders that are nigh impossible to get a bead on otherwise.
Now, obviously, a good pistol does not a good game make. But, Ion Fury’s excellent pistol is one important piece of why this game’s arsenal works so well. It signals that each weapon is useful; an important tool to be used in the proper context. The Clusterpuck cannot say to the Penetrator, “I have no need of you!” It’s your responsibility to figure out how each weapon fits into this arsenal like a novice chess player learning to move the Knight in an L.
As you wield this arsenal, you take on the role of Shelley “Bombshell” Harrison, the fascist leader — the “Story So Far” primer included in the game’s menu says that Shelley’s job is to bring justice to any criminals who dare defy “permanent martial law” — of Neo D.C.’s Domestic Task Force. Some of these criminals, led by the evil scientist Heskel, interrupt Shelley’s “attempt to get sloshed after another horrible day in urban hell,” and Shelley sets out to kill the mad doctor and finish her drink.
What ensues is ‘90s as hell, in ways both good and bad. If you haven’t followed Ion Fury during its early access phase, here’s a quick primer: Developed by Voidpoint, Ion Fury is one of two throwback shooters (the other being Wrath: Aeon of Ruin) being published by 3D Realms, the creators of Duke Nukem 3D. It wears it’s inspiration proudly, but with cleaner, more colorful graphics than the Build engine could manage back in the day.
Ion Fury also took inspiration from another, less welcome, source. Originally titled Ion Maiden, the game was the subject of a lawsuit by the rock band Iron Maiden. 3D Realms changed the name last month, avoiding a potential $2 million payout and landing on a slightly less kickass title.
It was easy to root for Ion Fury during that controversy. It was a frivolous lawsuit and Iron Maiden (and/or their lawyers) should be mocked relentlessly for forcing a cool retro shooter to change its name (in spite of the fact that no living person could possibly confuse the two). It has been less easy to root for Ion Fury during its latest controversy. A ResetEra user discovered and published screenshots of sexist, ableist and transphobic language from a pair of developers in the Ion Fury Discord server. Voidpoint initially stated that the statements hadn’t been properly contextualized, but on Monday, 3D Realms and Voidpoint issued a full-throated apology.
“Members of Voidpoint’s Ion Fury team have made sexist and transphobic comments, and included homophobic language in Ion Fury. We recognize these statements are insensitive, unacceptable, and counterproductive to causes of equality. We unequivocally apologize both for these comments and language as well as for any pain they have caused the gaming community, particularly women and members of the LGBTQ community. We take full responsibility for any damage that has been done to the relationships we’ve worked so hard to build.”
The mention of “homophobic language in Ion Fury” is a reference to a lotion bottle bearing the label, “OGAY,” (haha, like Olay, so funny!) and a secret room with a message containing a homophobic slur.
“Moving forward, Voidpoint will institute a zero-tolerance policy for this type of language and all employees and contractors will undergo mandatory sensitivity training. As part of our efforts to contribute to the work that must be done to further support these communities, we are donating $10,000 from Ion Fury’s release day proceeds to The Trevor Project. We are also patching Ion Fury ASAP to remove all unacceptable language.”
That’s a good apology. Time will tell if anything changes for the bad actors at Voidpoint, but an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a promise to make real, concrete changes is a good place to start. However, the broader problem is Voidpoint’s decision to uncritically accept the milieu that produced Duke Nukem in the first place. While most games that take inspiration from problematic source material attempt to emulate the good and ignore the bad (see: Cuphead and Call of Cthulhu ignoring the racism of Fleischer and Lovecraft, respectively), Ion Fury is attempting to capture the look and attitude of Duke Nukem 3D.
In doing so, Voidpoint has found an approach that mostly works. The retro art and soundtrack are both excellent. Shelley’s one-liners are crass, but never harmful. The environmental design borrows heavily from Duke Nukem 3D’s approach to building representational spaces. A city block, a subway system, a laboratory; Ion Fury models convincing versions of these real places and then adapts their architecture to accommodate the lock-and-keycard structure that ‘90s shooters used to gate progress. These levels are sprawling, vibrant and packed with a variety of enemies that will challenge you to use every weapon in your arsenal. Just like you need a blue keycard to open a blue door, you’ll need the Ion Bow to take out the skinless muscle men that warp around levels like miniature flying Titans. Everything in its place.
So, mechanically, Ion Fury is a success. It’s fast (though not as fast as last year’s DUSK) and fluid and the levels are fun to explore. But, it goes awry in its attempt to parody the shooters of the era. While the writing is clearly tongue-in-cheek — “permanent martial law” should be a clue — it isn’t clear what Ion Fury is satirizing. “Great job! … but real players aim for 100% (are you a real player?)” the game asks, if you finish a level without collecting all the secrets. Nothing in the game comments on or satirizes this ‘90s git gud, gatekeeping attitude. Developer Terminix’s comments in the Discord server that “SJWs” “are fucking nuts” seems to indicate that some at Voidpoint share the attitude that games aren’t for everybody, and that those seeking to make games more accessible for marginalized people are ruining the industry.
Ion Fury is a good game that fumbles its opportunity to update the attitude of ‘90s shooters. And, in some ways, Voidpoint — inside and outside the game — contributes to the toxicity it appears to be trying to satirize.
Ion Fury review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Ion Fury is out now on PC. PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch version later in 2019
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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