Phantom Fury

I just finished up the campaign and sure, PF have some good things going for it - the core gunplay is fun and the retro-style graphics works pretty well but it really feels like playing the beta version of a game. The game is obviously inspired by both Duke Nukem, Deus Ex and Half Life (in no particular order) and when everything works as it should, the game really is a great homage to the giants of yesterday but all too often, it fails to maintain the same pace. The level design leaves a lot to be desired - I got stuck a dozen or so times since the game is just bad at communicating what it wants you to do. Enemies frequently gets stuck themselves in the enviroment and while they usually can hit you with frightening accuracy, sometimes they will just stand around staring into the sunset, waiting for you to put them out of their misery. Other bugs are worse - I had to restart the level on two occasions as the game didn't allow me to proceed and certain weapons effect, like the pistols alt-fire (the stun gun) stopped working half the time, so did the SMG when I wanted to dual wield them. Throwing your bowling grenades can sometimes work wonders and sometimes they will bounce off invisible walls and go in another direction. Then of course we have the actual story. I have no idea what the story was about. It was so poorly told I honestly don't know why the characters did what they did. I don't know if the devs just ran out of money mid development or something because it just feels unfinished. Not a bad game but a very unpolished one. Buy at your own risk.

Been looking forward to this game for over half a year. I literally start the game and IN THE FIRST ROOM the first error occurs requiring a restart of the game (the first wall you break to escape the room you start in simply disappeared and wouldn't let me pass). Now I'm in the mines after about an hour of gameplay, having finally found my first upgrade terminal at the end of the last level. ALL OF MY WEAPON UPGRADES ARE GONE. 3D Realms is more like Mediocre Nightmare Realms. Either games like Wrath of Aeon and Graven take forever (pun not intended, that has been done to death) or... this. At absolute best this is early access with what must surely be a ton of cut content. I mean, they talk about "interaction with the environment", and it would be nice... except they simply redo what Half Life did. And leave out the microwave interactivity, too! The initial pistol (which is your ONLY long range option for quite a while) is like the Half Life 2 9mm, minus easy headshots AND accurate shot placement. I swear it is like tickling enemies, and 2 to 3 headshots in a row to kill someone with a helmet (which are 40% of enemies), and apparently hitting them in the face sometimes counts as a "miss". There are nice features, I am sure. But some enemies are downright annoying. Drones swarm you from the start, IN CLOSE QUARTERS. That wouldn't be so bad, except you move like you're drunk, have no armor, sometimes-can-and-sometimes-can't jump over waist-high objects, and... the drones fly fast, shoot you, then explode. And why do all of my homing grenades reset to ZERO held at every mission start??? There is probably a lot to like about this game somewhere, and I still regularly play games for the 90s/00s. But it has all the BAD features of games from the past 28 years, including outsourced beta testing. No wonder it is getting its tail whooped on Steam reviews, too. Simply inexcusable. Will wait a bit for a patch, then may refund if nothing happens. Will see.

Due to the many bugs, the game is not really playable. Not all enemies always appear, but in order for a door to open, all of them must be defeated. Using a keycard triggers a fatal error and things like that make the game unplayable for me. Some things can be fixed by restarting the game, but I can't get around the fatal error.

I was excited for this game, but after 6 hours I give up. The main problem of this game are enemies, half of the enemies are terribly annoying, Drones that detonates after 10 seconds after death doing big damage, suicide enemies that are requiring 2-3 shots of shotgun, bullet sponge-high-speed-high damage that rush. It also loves to spawn them behind the player. The weapons are also mostly miss, it takes stupidly long to get anything long-range even thou lots of enemies love to stand in back a shoot (ridiculously accurate). Lots of maps are labyrinths that are just annoying to navigate. I encountered lots of bugs. I just gave up, cannot recommend for anyone.