Upon beginning your journey into Fury, you are shown some comic-book like scenes that are accompanied by a voice-over explaining the history of the game world. It’s pretty standard stuff for a game of this type, so once you’re past that, you get to create your character. There are a fair few customization options to make the character you want, which is expected. Once you’re in the game world, you’re given a tutorial of sorts which explains the basics in moving around and goes over a little bit of combat. After a few minutes of this, you get to choose which character class you want to start out as – and there are 8, including Champion and Healer from the Life School, Warden and Oracle from the Growth School, Destroyer and Invoker from the Death School and Overlord and Defiler from the Decay School. Each comes with its own set of unique set of starting skills, and each school has its own strengths and weaknesses against the others.
Hmm... probably best NOT to fall off that bridge...
What is good about Fury is that once you’ve made your character class to begin with, you don’t have to necessarily stick with that through the duration of the game. If you make a Champion for example, you can quite easily go to the Decay School and learn some abilities from there instead of the Life School. Or you can always go to one of the other available Schools. Or you can make a character that has a mix of all the major skills from each School that can be ready to attack or defend in any situation. A cool thing about your choice in class and skills is that if you decide you want a different class from your initial decision, you’re free to save your current class as a template of sorts while you make a new one. This is handy in team battles, where it’s wise to have a range of different classes available so that you can choose which one the team requires most to claim victory.
The most important aspect of the game though, is of course the combat. Running around a big area filled with other players and NPCs, it’s as easy as talking to the NPC that corresponds with the type of Warzone you want to take part in, of which there are three. Bloodbath, a 32-player free-for-all; Vortex, a team-based capture-the-flag type of game and Elimination, a group versus group contest where the last team standing wins. After talking to the NPC of your choice, you’re placed into a battle queue of sorts, where there is usually a very minimal wait time before you jump into the action.
Combat itself works in a similar fashion to most MMORPGs, where you have a quick bar that features a bunch of skills (of your choosing) that you use to wear down your opponents until their health bar is at zero. There is also a variety of power-ups on each Warzone map which can be picked up, including health and attack boosts as well as defenses against certain skills. While they do add an extra element to each battle, it’s a bit disappointing when sometimes an attack power-up can overcome the work you put into making specific skills stronger. That being said, it does mean that everyone is on an almost level playing-field, which means that new players won’t necessarily get crushed by the veterans.
Combat can be intense and exciting.
An extra aspect of combat found in Fury is ‘charges’. Coming in four types (Water, Fire, Air and Nature), some skills will give you charges, while the more powerful skills will take charges away from you. This is why it’s important to balance your range of skills so that you’ll always have some smaller skills that add charges to build up to the stronger attacks. Not all charges work well together either, with water directly detracting from your fire charges and so on. The cooldown period for most skills is also usually short, so that battles are always fast-paced and interesting.
Once the battle is over, rewards are handed out. Some loot is available for those that did well in battle, and players are awarded essence of the four schools based on their performance, as well as Fury Essence. Fury Essence can be traded with NPCs that offer ‘trials’ to earn specific skills, along with memories of your past life, which is basically a brief explanation of where the skill originated. Trials never move on beyond requiring a certain number of essences, so you’re going to be fighting a lot of people to be able to earn some of the better skills that are offered later on.
While the fights in Fury can be intense, the fact that there are only three modes of play means that it can get repetitive rather quickly. Unless you’re the type of person that will sit down and literally experiment with all the classes the game has to offer, it’s difficult to sit down and play for prolonged periods of time unless you’re hungry for some statistics. We also found that a lot of the skills you earn throughout the game are pretty much useless. In this type of fast-paced combat, lowering somebody’s Fire skill by 10% isn’t going to end up making a whole lot of difference to the outcome of battle. It seemed like we relied on a couple of specific skills in our battles, and didn’t really bother with the rest of them all that much.
The game world itself is also lacking, as it isn’t so much a game world as it is a big town of sorts. While on some level it is fun to explore new areas and buildings to find different NPCs that offer a wide range of functions, it’s very frustrating to repeatedly have to travel through what is essentially a big lobby just to find simple things like armor repair or a new skill. Auran could have easily compacted the area so that it didn’t require so much wandering, and it just feels like they wanted to make the world itself seem a bit bigger, as the game is really focused around the combat more than anything else anyway.
Finally, that yoga crap is paying off!
Graphically, Fury looks good, but not great. Character models are very basic for the most part, as are the animations, and there is nothing really outstanding about the product as a whole. The maps do look nice though, and offer a variety of different options for combat. On the High-End rendering engine, however, the game does look much better, but is still lacking in detail in some areas. Ultimately, it’s not the prettiest game on the PC, but it does a good job, and there is little to no slowdown in the game itself which is always handy, especially in hectic battle scenarios. The sound is also generally lacking, and although it has all the basic effects that accompany magic spells and attacks, it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. The voice-over work is also fairly irritating, but is balanced by the music, which actually sounds solid and fits the game perfectly.
One great thing about Fury is that once you've purchased it, it's free to play. This does seperate it from a lot of games which require a monthly fee to be able to experience them. There is however a payment plan in place for those people that wish to make the absolute most out of their experience. All players have unlimited access to maps, abilities and items, but those players that pay (deemed as 'Immortals') have things available to them like quick travel between schools, additional item slots, priority log-in queuing, entry into special ladders and other benefits. It should also be noted that all players have Immortal access for free for the first month of play. The extra benefits of being an Immortal are only useful if you absolutely love every facet the game, so keep that in mind before getting out the credit card.
Fury is a very muddled experience to say the least. While it’s clear that developer Auran had a vision of what they wanted to accomplish, by doing this, they seem to have missed some key points of gameplay that a game of this type requires to stay interesting. While the Warzone modes themselves are fun, there are only 3 of them, so it’s difficult not to get bored after prolonged periods of playing. The graphics and sound are also nothing we haven’t seen or heard before, and the combat is essentially the tried-and-true MMORPG style, but faster. In trying to create a PVP-only experience, Fury succeeds, but it’s certainly not for everyone – and with no specific quests or storyline really to speak of, it’s targeting a very specific market. If you’re part of that market, and PVP combat is your thing, then this definitely could be worth your time.
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