Fury Unleashed is the latest and biggest game to come out of Polish studio Awesome Games Studio. This self-published title is a complex love letter to fanboys of all types, hitting the run n’ gun genre and rogue-likes with a distinctive comic book style and a fair amount of meta storyline that breaks the fourth wall. There are bits of Contra, Rogue Legacy, Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, and a whole lot more here. While hard to pin down, it’s a blended mix of genres that has a lot of potential. But does it surpass the sum of its parts? Let’s take a look.
You play out a comic book hero created by the famed yet reclusive John Kowalsky, an artist and writer uncomfortable with his own success and bothered by what he thinks are poor life choices. Each section of Fury Unleashed plays out like a comic book panel, with the map matching the setup and each panel equating to a room in the game. This is a twin stick shooter and your right stick fires and aims while the left moves. Dashing, jumping and double jumping are built in and you have grenades available as well as a melee attack. Through the game you’ll also locate a variety of additional weaponry, ranging from as mundane as a baseball bat to as wild as alien weaponry that fires poison bullets and much, much more.
Since this is a rogue-like as well, you never know what the rooms will look like on each playthrough, nor can you depend on weaponry to be consistent, so it’s important to get the hang of each type of weapon or you likely won’t survive long. Damage is rapid and vicious and it’s easy to die in Fury Unleashed, especially at first. Simply barrel on through, kill everything, and be careful what you take from chests. Some of the penalties for taking items can be quite steep, even game-ending. Enemies are mostly fairly easy at first, but their attacks ramp up quickly as you move from section to section of each stage and your movement speed doesn’t. You will definitely die, and die a lot.
Once you finally kick it, you see how many levels your character has gained and spend the skill points on permanent upgrades, much like Rogue Legacy. You can also alter your loadout if you’ve earned alternate starting weaponry, but the default SMG is often the best way to start. Back into the fray you go and good luck to you! After a while, you’ll end up finishing a section of a level at some point and the fourth wall will be broken, exposing bits of Kowalsky’s insecurities and explaining bit by bit what you’re really doing as his creation.
In addition to the basic combat involved in Fury Unleashed, it would be remiss not to mention the combo system. This game is designed to feed off of combos made by killing enemies. Kill enough fast enough and you start to unlock combos, making enemies drop more ink, gold ink, and health globules, and unlocking certain areas if you happen to be in the right place at the right time. Drop the right number of combos and unlock a warp to a hidden area, but it’s random like everything else and more often than not, you’ve killed everything in the room by the time you notice it and lost your combo. Focus on combos is one of the primary keys to really progressing in Fury Unleashed and you’ll find that as you play, levels get easier as you learn to chain combos and keep them going between rooms. It increases the risk by dashing into a room to keep a chain going, but everything about Fury is a risk versus reward balance, one that is surprisingly gratifying.
Bosses, like everything else, are random and just because you think you know what you’re up against doesn’t mean you’ll be right. Everything is randomized except the type of enemies in each section, and this allows you to at least plan for enemy types in each phase of the game after you inevitably die again. There are four sections to the game, each with multiple sub-sections, sub-bosses, more powerful enemies, the works. It’s a vast game for how fast it plays, and it’s a delight to adventure randomly through it. You’ll definitely spend the most time in the jungle level while you get a feel for the game and build up your character, but each section has its challenges. Revealing them would take away the sense of surprise that Fury Unleashed manages to provide, so it’s better to avoid spoiling things.
The flow of the game is something that’s incredibly important here. Fury has an excellent design. Controls are tight and responsive, aiming is intuitive, there are a ton of weapons and items to choose from, and things feel fresh and new even after repeated playthroughs and hair-pulling deaths. Simply put, this is a game that’s extremely well-designed and plays like it. The comic book style, vaguely reminiscent of a cross between Metal Slug and Comix Zone, fits the gameplay perfectly, allowing for caricatures of real people while still seeming gritty and violent. The music is absolutely thumping too, urging you to take risks and throw yourself at enemies with abandon as your combo count rises and the beat permeates your game. That makes sense since the composers are Adam Skorupa and Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz of The Witcher, another game known for its epic soundtrack!
There’s really nothing at all bad about Fury Unleashed. It runs extremely smoothly on an Xbox One X and controls are simple and intuitive. As a rogue-like at its core, some patience is of course required, but even replays for hours aren’t at all tedious and it’s easy to find yourself utterly losing track of time while playing…certainly the mark of a good game! With incremental progress making you feel like you’re accomplishing something while you bash in assorted monsters of all sorts, it’s hard not to love this game.
Fury Unleashed will take you somewhere between 10 and 20 hours to beat, depending on your skill level, patience, and a bit of luck. That’s a fair amount of game for $20, and certainly nothing to scoff at. It’s not the largest rogue-like out there, but it’s certainly a whole whack of fun, executed with style, and smooth as silk to play. It’s also hard as hell and anyone looking for a casual, light platformer should just step off, because this one ain’t for you. Everyone else, rejoice, because this is one of those sweet indie titles that really keeps indie gaming striving for the best and pushing gaming forward! Fury Unleashed is absolutely not to be missed!
This review was based on a digital copy of Fury Unleashed provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox One X using a 55” 1080p Sony LED TV. Fury Unleashed is also available for PS4, Switch, and PC. Photos are press shots from the devs, as for some reason, XBox Live doesn’t like me to upload screenshots and this game is so fast, it’s hard to get them anyway!