Game review: Fury – PC
Fury is a new MMO from Auran entertainment that seeks to bring something new to the fold. The biggest complaint about modern MMO's such as World of Warcraft, Eve Online and Guild Wars is that they rely on long and boring grind sessions, constant repetition of the same simple actions over and over for hours if not days and weeks on end. Fury, conversely, seeks to alleviate this by being a "PVP" MMO, in that game play consists almost entirely of fighting other players in arena style combat. There is no world to explore and no significant storyline, just a lot of fast paced player-versus-player bloodletting.
Skills and Items are acquired as the reward of battles. Skills are purchased with essence, similar to experience, and as there are no set classes you can learn skills as you wish to fit your playing style. Items are equipped to match your available equip points, and are gained from the item pool provided at the conclusion of a battle. As your character gets stronger the match making system matches you against characters of equal skill, so that you're always facing a challenge. In a sense the game feels a little like rocket arena with some RPG elements, rather than a traditional MMO. The share quantity of skills is a bit of an issue, as many of them are useless, serving simply to confuse and bewilder you than being tantalizing options for advancement.
Graphically speaking the arenas are impressive and well designed. Player characters can be made to look great, and you can gain real pleasure from assembling the results of your conquests into a nasty looking badass. There are some problems with optimization, and the engine can run clunky even on the greatest of systems, which is a pain in an online game that has enough problems with lag connecting to American servers. The other issue is consistency, with some of the choices available and map designs being questionable at best. This is also jarring when in combination with the sound effects which leave something to be desired.
As far as the game play goes there is more options for tactical mastery than what you would traditionally get in an MMO, which no doubt stems from the myriad of skills and lack of classes. Combat is fast paced and over quickly, as the maps themselves are so small that once inside you're in the thick of it straight off. This gets somewhat tiresome, and I found myself getting bored with the repetition quickly. A new free expansion pack is coming soon however, and with luck some of the new game modes will provide more of a satisfying experience.
In short, Fury is an interesting concept, but one that perhaps needs more practice before its worth getting obsessed with. The over abundance of useless and trivial skills and the clunkyness of some of the game mechanics makes the game more tiresome than exciting, but with any luck these issues will be fixed in time. If the idea sounds interesting to you, then give it a go, but I would rate it as average at best.
