In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the past week, Ion Fury just launched worldwide. And it is totally awesome. Yeah that game made by 3D Realms, the guys that brought us Duke Nukem. They also got sued by Iron Maiden, the rock band, while the game was still in development, but i’ll talk about that a bit later.

So what is it? A game that follows the path of any first person shooter, but there’s a twist. The game is inspired by Duke Nukem and by that i mean a huge arsenal of weapons that help you turn the huge amount of monsters into pieces of goo. The premise is simple, you play as a female cop in a dystopian-ish city full of enemies that try to stop you from your duties. Think of a neo noir city just like in Blade Runner. Your name is Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison, but you kinda’ act like the female version of Duke, to put it into simple words.

Expect high paced action and a lot of blood while you’re satisfyingly destroy your foes. Expect humans, robots and all the cliche enemies you’d see in a Robocop movie. The game is totally different on each difficulty setting you choose. You gonna’ need to be good at math and do some calculations before barging in a wide open room full of ammo. Huge waves of enemies will make you hit that reload button quite often, so think about what your next move should be.

Puzzles, there’s a bunch of them and this is find particularly tedious and you need to backtrack a lot in this game. Go to that part of the map, click on some button that activates a gear on the other side which in turn opens some goddamn door on a totally different part of the map. This is annoying if you wanna progress fast and mostly to go kill monsters, no questions asked. You could keep on exploring as each stage has a huge amount of secrets, triggered mostly in a 90s style, which means you have to look very carefully. You’d say a secret couldn’t be there….aaaand that’s exactly where it is. The quirkiness of the 90s, gotta love it.

You’ll be fighting on the street, underground labs, city blocks, sewers and of course a level takes place entirely on a train that is moving because fuck you, this game brings back the 90s. Any respectable game from that era had a train level, a moving train or something on tracks. Each stage is quite easy to progress through, even if it seems you’re stuck, just take a short breath, make sure there are no enemies in the near vicinity and just open your eyes and look around. Just by their color and texture, the assets in the world actually show you which door can be opened or which piece of wall will probably be destroyed via some small trigger.

Weapons selection is not bad, but i would have added more, at least a flamethrower, imho. You’ll get your usual armor and health packets, but you can also eat food and drink beverages scattered all over the map for some boosts. Ahh, yes, ye ol’ faithful vending machine and pizza slices randomly scattered in odd places. Guess those devs really loved pizza. The fun part is that Shelly talks, she mostly gives out lines from movies or other games, such as “Praise the Sun” or “Clean up on aisle Your Ass” and many more. She talks about penises at some point. I won’t spoil the fun, play the game and you’ll laugh as events trigger her responses. The music is out of this world, just perfect for each section. As of graphics, i don’t really have much to add, pixels everywhere at a huge resolution and big ass frame rate.

Now about the Iron Maiden lawsuit. When the game was in development and there was a preview release of the game, which i have also played, the game was called Ion Maiden. Huh? See the catch? The rock band sued the developers for a huge amount of money, a lot of zeros, my friend. They finally settled in court, but i still stink Ion Maiden could have made a better name that Ion Fury. Fucking singers, think they own all the fucking names, well screw you too, assholes. Might sound like your band name, but ain’t the same thing. Cunts!

No, don’t even think about coop, if you want that go play some other “new” fps games. I like my game play just how i like my women, single. I do think a multiplayer could be nice, but i think the devs will sit on their laurels and won’t do shit. I’ll leave that part to the modding community.

Overall it’s a fun game, it may be new but it’s built on the nostalgia of the 90s. Any true gamer should spend some time on this one, who knows when we’ll get a similar game in the future. It’s not pretentious, it is what it is. I missed the fast paced, gun-blazzin’ atmosphere that first person shooters from back in the day always managed to pull off. Go get yourself a copy and ride along down memory lane. Cheers!