Review: Fury3 (PC- Win95/3.1)

Released a week after the official worldwide launch of Windows 95, Fury3 is a fun and single player only combat simulator with but a few flaws and possibly one of the most memorable games in my childhood. The story is like Terminator/I-Robot/The Matrix. Man Creates Machine. Machine Becomes Sentient. Machine Gets Annoyed (well. More than annoyed). Machine Overthrows The Human Race. Do not let that get in the way of trying it out, if everyone got angry at the fact that games back in 1995 used plot lines of some famous (as well as those to become famous) movies, we wouldn't have a gaming industry. The Bions were created to save the human race during the IP wars (what the IP war was over, I dont know), and were used to fight for the many planets of the Terran's. However when the wars ended, the Bions were still angry and fighty (to say the least), so the Terran council placed an executive order to destroy them. The Bions didn't like this idea at all, so went on to turn against their masters all over the system.

Fury3 is a very intuitive game- simple controls do not detract from the action, and a very clear hud lets you know where you are or what you need to do. From left to right you have : Shield, Turbo, the obvious ones such as weapons and objectives, co-ordinates, how far away from your objective you are and the radar. Radar makes this game a wonder to play; something which a lot of games these days fails at miserable. Red is bad, blue is good. + is above you and – is below you. Easy as pie.

For every planet, there is 3 missions; missions entail taking out either groups of Bions, construction sites and bases with the ending of the 3^rd mission being some kind of huge boss Bion. Each planet has different enemies from gun ships to fighters, to floating sail barges (kind of like the ones from Star Wars). They all fit in aesthetically to the look of the level (in an Egyptian themed level they look like something from Stargate) Each planet has a lot of variety- deserts, ocean like worlds, a big city, an asteroid, Egyptian style architecture. The only level I found boring was the last one, the games namesake “Fury”. It's just an epileptic looking blue plane from horizon to horizon- the Bion home world (that they created obviously). Between each planet there is a nice little fly over cut scene.

Planets have bases dotted around them, and there are bunkers lying around which can be blown up that store either new weapons, shields or turbo boost. Thankfully these all carry over the the next level, and boost is stackable meaning the more you get, the longer you go- I've never maxed it out but I'm assuming its 999 based on the fact that the hud has space for 3 characters (anything more must be “INF”, i.e.: infinite). Dog fighting doesn't just occur above ground, frequently you will have to fly into some tight tunnels and blow open doors, or even use your afterburner to move as fast as possible to get past some that open and shut. Flying into them you will pass through- they aren't really solid, but you will take a rather large hit to your shields. Luckily there tends to be a full shield boost at the end of the tunnel or in a bunker, and sometimes destroying enemies will make them drop a small booster with just enough to get by till you find one.

Sound in the game is brilliant, everything is nice and distinct, from the enemies flying overhead/near you, to the effects of the lasers. With a decent sound system with a little bass it has a bit of “oomph” to it. The music is catchy and memorable and sets the pace nicely for each planet, for example, the Mars level sounds quite dark, and the asteroid level with rocks and explosions crashing round is quite fast paced. Sorry, I forgot the names already, they are distinctly SciFi like- “Sebek”, “Ares” and “L24-D”. a lot of it is decided mechanical. The real bonus is that you can play the CD in a regular CD player and listen to it wherever you like as they are just audio tracks- the game lets you know this during install.

As for graphics, they really haven't aged well. Being the early days of 3D, they weren't crisp and clean like we're used to today. The draw distance is terrible, and the levels come off as foggy. Explosions are sprite based, and despite it being awesome to play a lot of the levels feel relatively bare and underpopulated by the enemy. Gameplay wise it's still a lot of fun, despite the enemies seeming like they are “on rails” as such, really only noticeable in this day and age due to the advances in AI, back then I was astonished at how real it all seemed.

All in all, an extremely fun game- I'll link to the demo so you can try it out for yourself. Otherwise check out the gameplay videos linked at the end of the article. It's not considered “abandonware” as the Developer still exists (and still makes games; most recently developed the Ghostbusters 2009 game)- so you will have to hunt a full version out yourself. Plenty of copies are out in places like E-Bay and occasionally it appears on TradeMe. You might get lucky like me and find it at Cash Converters, but I'll tell you now it sure won't be my copy. If you want much of the same, then try out Terminal Velocity, by the same developer- it's much more common and was released earlier in the year and features the same game engine. There is also a sequel, with a new game engine, known as “Hellbender” that continues the stories of Earth/Terran's vs the Bions.

MEDIA Fury3 Demo ( Microsoft's FTP - 4.6mb)