8/10

Great game. Devs are bad people. Don't pay money for this game, but you should still play it if you can.

So this game is almost good, but I dropped it near the end.

There's some really crappy sound design in this game. Multiple times the background soundtrack will play on top of diegetic music in the game like in a mall or on top of a jukebox. Competent devs will usually make the background music fade as you walk toward said jukebox music so that the songs are not playing on top of one another simultaneously. This happens multiple times.

While the effort to make the protagonist witty and fun like Duke Nukem and Caleb from Blood ALMOST worked, they ultimately failed because she CONSTANTLY REPEATS THE SAME PHRASES again and again. I know you can turn off the voice over, but devs, c'mon. I'd rather have competent VO since some of the lines are charming and immersive for that 90s feel. But how many times do I have to hear that lame "worthless consumer model" line!? Like it was funny the first time, but the literal 20th or so time I heard it was just so annoying. It's like being trapped in school with a neurodivergent kid who can't stop vocally stimming on a phrase he heard in a cartoon over and over again. Is it really that hard to bind certain phrases to particular sections so they're not repeated ad nauseum? Or could you, I don't know, have the actress say just a few more lines!?

While the shooting and movement did feel good, the overall gameplay just kind of feels stale near the end. Hard to put my finger on why. A little more enemy variety might have helped? Maybe I should have played on the hard difficulty rather than the default difficulty, but I've played easy shooters before that felt more fun than Ion Fury.

The final straw for me came near the end of the game. I was kind of feeling meh about it, but wanted to finish it. Then there was this really tedious and dumb puzzle where you have to uses three switches to line up three quickly revolving doors to get a keycard inside. Well, I got them lined up enough that I was able to squeeze in, but I COULD NOT GET OUT. I tried for a few minutes. Since I hadn't saved for a while and the game does not give you an option to load the last checkpoint, I just blew myself up with bombs. The checkpoint was at the beginning of the level and would have me repeat like 15 minutes or so of boring gameplay. So instead I dropped the game and I'm writing this review.

Other minor nitpicks: I can't map anything to the 2 side buttons on my mouse like I always do for FPS games--one button for the shotgun and the other for a rapid fire weapon. There's also fall damage which sometimes feels unnecessary for how not-that-high up you are...but it doesn't matter because there's also too many health pick ups.

This game isn't terrible and will scratch that Duke Nukem 3D itch, but I personally wouldn't pay more than 10 bucks for it when there's so many better, cheaper FPS games out there. C tier game for me. It's a shame because building a new game with a classic engine is a really awesome idea, but there's just not enough polish here for me.

Play Cultic instead. Best boomer shooter ever.