Phantom Fury is a decent boomer shooter, albeit one that emphasizes environmental interactivity over an arcade-inspired killing spree in which everything is a weapon. The few moments of cinematic silliness are par for the course in the boomer shooter genre, but they’re not enough to make this any less of a slog.
Part of what makes boomer shooters fun is their over-the-top presentations, be it excessive gore, ridiculous traversal, thematics that avoid taking themselves too seriously, and/or high-octane gameplay that is encapsulated in retro-fueled pixels. They don’t cater to precise shooting or believable plots, instead opting for unbelievable storylines with occasional plot twists and guns with bullet spreads so broad that you could technically aim in any direction and still manage to clip an enemy. If anything, they’re fantastic entry points into the FPS genre given their accessibility, broader (yet potentially more mature) themes, and overall silliness.
When I first began playing Phantom Fury, I was expecting something that would, at the minimum, incorporate some of those elements. What I got was a boomer shooter that seems to have lost its way in favor of design decisions that feel out of place for the genre. Or, it could be a boomer shooter that is still a work-in-progress. Either way, I’m mildly disappointed.
Phantom Fury is not a direct sequel to 2019’s Ion Fury, but it takes place in the same universe and stars Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison. Upon waking up from a coma, she finds that she has a bionic arm and is set on a crash course through the USA to find the Demon Core. You don’t need to have played Ion Fury to get into this game, thankfully, but then again some characters (old and new) seem to emerge as important without a clear explanation as to their purpose or relationship with Shelly. If anything, the game assumes that the player will just trust the process and shoot about their business rather than pay attention to the worldbuilding. Then again, who plays a boomer shooter for the lore? I sure don’t.
It’s all about the booms, baby. Lots of ‘em.
Phantom Fury sure has the boom of boomer shooter, tasking me to use environments and a wide arsenal of weapons to take down everything in my path. Shelly is in essence a weapon of mass destruction – everything she comes into contact with is to be destroyed, blown to smithereens, or used as a weapon to blow something or someone else into smithereens. No thoughts, only shooting. The true way of boomer shooters.
Despite the simplicity of the gameplay, several things set Phantom Fury back. The first of which is its movement, which feels sluggish. I had the ability to run and slide, but more often than not it felt like I was running through sludge. A select few ledges could be climbed, restricting my ability to move around the levels. My dash would propel me forward or slam my fist into enemies, but it lacked the fluidity to keep me focused on an arcade killing spree.
I immediately picked up on Phantom Fury’s enemies feeling spongy, almost inhumanly durable, when my gigantic weapons shot them. Sometimes an enemy would react to me shooting them in the face, others would ignore the lead being pumped into them from my weapons. They exploded into a fountain of blood and gore, which was great. However, I kept assuming that enemies would react to shots and my attacks would melt enemies in increasingly gruesome fashions.
Weapons can be upgraded at drop pods that tend to emerge at the end of a level, or at least near the end. While it was great to see additional utility from my weapons, the game outright avoided onboarding me into how to potentially use these weapons. I learned way too late that there was an alternate firing mode to most of my guns. One of my pistols could automatically target enemies’ heads (think of Overwatch’s Cole Cassidy’s Deadeye Ultimate ability); one of my shotguns could stun enemies with a burst of light. Both are worthwhile alternate firing modes, but why weren’t they highlighted?
It’s strange for so little to be communicated in a game like this. Chaos, raining bullets, mass destruction, and using every weapon imaginable are core to the boomer shooter identity. Weapon upgrades boost that power fantasy from overpowered to just plain absurd. Upgrades give the weapons themselves (as well as the game) a splash of bloody flavor. When little is told to the player on how to reach those absurd degrees of violence, or at least encouraged to reach those heights, the player misses out on otherwise fun gunplay. I was able to fight the way I wanted in Phantom Fury, but I didn’t uncover its potential until far too late.
Phantom Fury has incorporated an absurd degree of environmental interactivity, more than I have seen in boomer shooters of late. I say absurd as a way to quantify the number of things that can be interacted with in-game. Some are necessary for progression (like going to a computer and into a menu to unlock a gate) while others are there for the sake of silliness. It’s almost to the point where its implementation feels misguided in the grand scheme of making Phantom Fury a notable boomer shooter.
I say misguided because this game leans too heavily on everything being interactable. You can walk to a sink, press the action button, and it begins to fill with water. Shooting fishtanks drains them of their contents. A handful of arcade games can be played when you come across their cabinets. You can open doors. Press buttons. Open drawers. Turn on old computer towers. Launch rockets into space. Check computers for NPC logs in hopes for a hint in how to unlock a locked door that may or may not be required for progression. This absurd degree comes at the expense of additional thought into gunplay and iconic sequences that make boomer shooters off-the-wall.
The levels range from tight corridors to openly expansive fields, both good signs for a boomer shooter. The further into the story I went, the more the world opened up. This also meant that levels had to be broken up into checkpoints to ensure that I didn’t have to restart the entire level over again if I perished at the hands of an enemy or was unlucky enough to walk off of a platform into a bottomless pit (of which there were only a few – don’t worry).
The levels’ openness proved to be a massive burden by the story’s halfway point around when I had unlocked the second tier of armor upgrades and a new set of abilities. These levels increasingly had small pockets that were so far off the beaten path, taking me several minutes out of the way only to find a single upgrade point or a single armor piece. A piddly reward at the bottom of a gigantic pool of water tucked away behind the spawn point was not worth the several minute trek. Despite these frustrations, I couldn’t help but scour the gigantic levels in hopes that I would find something, anything, that was worthwhile to reward me for wanting to explore. Every time I was let down. Every single time.
Level design like this should reward players with something meaningful for taking the time to go off the beaten path, like a tongue-in-cheek Easter egg or a ridiculous cache of items. Or even a unique boss! When I think of how other boomer shooters have rewarded players in this fashion, I think of how DOOM: ETERNAL hid datapoints/lore bits in the pockets of its levels, occasionally behind a gauntlet that would test my ability to dash, jump, shoot, or a combination of those three actions. TURBO OVERKILL would occasionally hide away a secret boss or an Easter egg that mocked the player for treading too far off path. I rarely got anything overpowered from these minor treks, but they ended up being worth it.
I would have hoped that progression was straightforward, or at least there was a way to offer hints for players distracted by the shiny things that were the interactable contents in each level. Remember how I said that just about everything can be interacted with in Phantom Fury? That degree of excessive intractability negatively impacted my progression. I frequently found myself confused about where to go after I had completed a task. Thanks to the levels’ expansiveness, this meant that I would often have to trek through gigantic fields, mazes of corridors, or occasionally backtracking altogether to figure out that an area that was once blocked off was now open.
Look, I am not against gigantic level designs for boomer shooters. I just want there to be something meaningful to shoot and find when attempting to explore. In my review of TURBO OVERKILL, I discuss how its larger levels allowed me to express creativity in traversing how I pleased thanks to Johnny Turbo’s chainsaw leg. Phantom Fury’s Shelly lacks parkour prowess and fluid traversal of her competitors, merely relying on a melee punch that dashes her forward and the occasional opportunity to crawl through air vents. If you’re finding yourself in a massive level without a vehicle, you’re often left to rely on running to get to the next chapter.
Phantom Fury’s massive levels watered down what was left of it being a boomer shooter. If I was spending more time walking in silence or futzing around interacting with a meaningless object, that meant I was spending less time doing what makes boomer shooters truly fun: chaotically shooting things and f***ing things up. This is a miss, folks.
Phantom Fury claims to be a combination of adrenaline-fueled road movie adventures and bombastic action. It underdelivers on both fronts. When I think of road movies full of bombastic action, I think of large chaotic sequences with explosions and gore galore set to fast-paced music to fuel the tension in any given scene. In the gaming medium, I think of things that add weight to what’s happening in-game like screen shake, events that dramatically change the layout of a level, and over-the-top ridiculousness to drive home the lengths the protagonist will take to save the day. Why use a pistol when a massive shotgun solves the problem in one bloody explosive shot?
I had completed a sequence where I had escaped a robotics facility in a helicopter and had to fly away through the Grand Canyon. I was being chased by an endless army of helicopters that were shooting at me from every direction. Oddly enough, there was very little music. There was only an occasional robotic AI voice that said “missiles refilled” or “shield replenished.”
I was astounded. I was shooting helicopters with machine guns and missiles, occasionally watching them blow up, yet there was very little to drive home the idea of my perilous aerial escapades until the very end of the level when the canyon began to collapse from all of the ruckus I had caused, ultimately resulting in my own crash.
Perhaps the leaning away from a high-octane action movie is intentional, or at least to harken back to a Black Mesa-esque experience that is interwoven through the story. Some of the game takes place in laboratories, gritty deserts, and secluded areas hiding nebulous secrets threatening the future of humanity. Some of the enemies I slayed acted like zombies – grotesque pale mutants who groaned and rushed me down while I was often distracted by greater threats in the form of soldiers with guns. Some monsters, too.
But even then, horror and mystique lacked presence. Walking into a laboratory of cadavers being used for robots and other means lacked the gruesomeness and uneasiness associated with walking into an area where I clearly don’t belong. Mad science is only mad when the dangers within threaten your future. Phantom Fury lacked that, too.
I encountered a number of bugs in-game that ultimately broke immersion and brought my attention to some of its setbacks. Enemy AI was inconsistent, occasionally freezing in place and allow me to fill their body with lead until they ultimately exploded in blood. One segment had me drive a car across a massive highway. Somehow, an explosion caused the car to jettison over a barrier without any way of me getting it back on the road. This turned the otherwise brisk level into a 15-minute running simulator, as I had no other option but to run down an empty road for a ridiculous amount of time. If I accidentally jumped onto a crate, it would send my character flying in an opposite direction while it rolled around as though it was a sphere. Some of these could be chalked up to oversights, and I have faith that some of these things could be ironed out later, but time will tell if these issues end up being fixed.
I feel like I’ve been beating a dead horse throughout this review, often concluding each paragraph with a statement of what Phantom Fury lacks. My experience with it was not the best experience, especially because I was led to believe that it was something more than it ended up being. Sure, I could blow enemies into bloody smithereens and punch my way through deadly environments. I infrequently felt like an action star thanks to small moments where the world around me seemed to fall apart thanks to my destructive actions. But all of this came second to design choices that valued environmental interaction and the mildest of puzzles that acted as facades to an otherwise lackluster boomer shooter.
Phantom Fury is a decent boomer shooter, albeit one that emphasizes environmental interactivity over an arcade-inspired killing spree in which everything is a weapon. The few moments of cinematic silliness are par for the course in the boomer shooter genre, but they’re not enough to make this any less of a slog.
A Phantom Fury key was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
