Phantom Fury requires several hours of patience before it starts to shine – and even then you’ll have to endure a considerable degree of jank and inconsistent quality throughout. In an era where competition is fierce and patience non-existent, it received middling reviews and predominantly negative user scores. Perhaps more annoying for the fans of the genre, Phantom Fury was yet another retro-inspired shooter published under Gearbox, which must have suffered from a turbulent development cycle. It’s got plenty of B-movie charm, solid shooting, and some standout level design, but these moments are interspersed with clunky or dull sections, often designed to highlight derivative and undercooked mechanics that ultimately dilute the experience rather than enhance it.
Phantom Fury serves as a sequel to 2019’s Ion Fury and a prequel to 2016’s Bombshell which first introduced bomb disposal expert Shelly Harrison. It features all the cliched villainy you’d expect, with power-hungry military men, unethical scientists, no shortage of betrayals, and plenty of cringeworthy one-liners. It dips briefly into Shelly’s past to flesh out her character, and it even features a cameo from John Blade – protagonist of 1998’s Sin – who gifts you his iconic magnum for the finale. That said, it’s not a game you should play for the plot as, at best, it provides a barely coherent excuse to push you from level to level and provide some justification for Shelly’s vendetta. Unlike Ion Fury – which used a modified version of the Build Engine that powered its inspiration, Duke Nukem – Phantom Fury emulates classic 3D shooters, such as Quake II, Half-life, and Sin, using an Unreal Engine 4 build that’ll look and feel familiar if you’ve played Graven. Rather than blisteringly fast movement, snappy shooting, coloured key hunts, and gory sprite-work, Phantom Fury is a more grounded 3D FPS, with greater verticality, more physics objects, more complex set-pieces, and chunkier gore – but also an identity crisis.
Starting off on the wrong foot
The opening level provides a hint of what’s to come, as you’re forced to read emails for codes, manipulate devices using terminals, stack crates, sneak through vents, and enter “0451” on a keypad to progress – all while being bombarded with updates to your mission log. It’s not bad in and of itself, and I’d argue a game like Graven benefitted from exploration, puzzling, and secret-hunting that was more enjoyable than the combat ever was. My issue is that Phantom Fury could stand on its own two feet as a pure FPS. It offers a diverse and situational arsenal, and plenty of mid- to late-game encounters that’ll test your mobility, tactics, and aim. However, the first third seems unfocused, happy to funnel you between bland corridor firefights against a small and familiar roster of enemy archetypes, frequently interspersed with gimmicky and janky set-pieces. The early game also saddles you with just a basic pistol, a pitifully weak pump shotgun, and the iconic Loverboy revolver that is still powerful, but also less reliable at locking on to enemies for a double-tap. To rub salt in the wound, my settings would often reset when loading a save, the weapon-wheel could stop working until I paused and un-paused the game, and rare hard crashes had a nasty habit of happening right at the end of gruelling battles or boss fights.
Getting into the groove
Yet despite those issues, by the time I entered the White Sands laboratory near the 3-hour mark, with nearly half the arsenal unlocked, Phantom Fury was starting to feel more like the iconic 3D shooters it wants to emulate. It pushed me to keep mobile, prioritise targets, constantly swap to the most effective tool for the job, and hoover up health and ammo pick-ups amidst the chaos. The degree of interactivity in the game world felt less like puzzle-based roadblocks, and more integral to the combat experience. Exploding barrels and steam vents sent enemies flying; the crates and walls I used for cover could crumble under fire; while in the background glass and props shattered, alarms went off showering the area in water or smoke, and soundtrack ramped up and down in sync with the action. Holding objects as shields or flinging them as weapons never felt reliable, but Shelly’s bionic arm allowed me to punch melee enemies into gibs, or briefly block incoming fire as I got close with the triple-barrelled Motherflakker shotgun in hand.
It was also around that point the level and encounter design began to feel a little more refined, consistent, and polished. Phantom Fury follows the traditional design of tight corridors leading into open arenas, but each level felt more interconnected and made better use of 3D space. You would emerge above or below areas you fought through earlier, open up smart shortcuts back after completing a sub-objective, while a greater variety of enemy archetypes would limit your ability to hunker down behind corners. Standout examples include the aforementioned “Buried Lab” that takes inspiration from Half-life’s “Blast Pit”, as you work your way around a central chamber reactivating a locked-down facility, dealing with rogue GDF forces and escaped mutants. After that came the “Train to Flagstaff” level, which sees you battling through claustrophobic carriages, before fighting your way back across the top of the train and fending off a helicopter. The “Grand Canyon Facility” is another interconnected laboratory level with some great vistas, while the “Los Alamos” levels begin with an outdoor rampage and giant mech battle, before completely shifting gear as you explore a creepy abandoned facility, juggling power distribution to access new areas and fending off mutants in the dark. The game culminates with running battles through the ruined streets of Chicago, a scrappy firefight up a skyscraper, and multi-phase rooftop boss battles.
Could we just skip the road trip?
Unfortunately, Phantom Fury’s is also described as a “road movie adventure”, which means vehicle sections that range from mediocre to frustrating. Your first encounter with a GDF jeep makes the Warthog sections in 2001’s Halo look remarkable in comparison, with clunky handling, boring terrain, and a useless machine gun that takes an age just to kill a basic grunt. A section in a stolen jet is entirely on-the-rails, leaving you to simply aim and alternate between another useless machine gun and moderately more useful missiles. A submersible section is perhaps the worst, combining imprecise movement with inaccurate torpedoes and swimming mutants that’ll insta-kill you if they get close. None of these sections are particularly long in the grand scheme of things, but they’re sandwiched between the good levels, felt the most janky, and always served as a downer.
As a consequence – and even after two major patches – it’s not easy to recommend Phantom Fury without highlighting the caveats. After a plodding opening hour or two, it gets into a groove – but it’s one that’s periodically interrupted by weak vehicle sections. What’s worse is that they never feel like a core part of the gameplay loop – just gimmicky additions that would have been better left as short cutscene transitions so the devs could doubled-down on polishing the on-foot sections. If you’ve got this far though, I’d say fans of the genre should grab it on a sale, just temper your expectations for an hour or two, and try focus on the 80% of the game that Phantom Fury gets mostly right.
Phantom Fury was played on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC and PlayStation 5.
