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Fury review

Game: Fury
Platform: PC
Genre: Fighting Action
Developer: Auran

Reader review by vince

November 09, 2007

Fury is one of the very few MMOs with a truly apt name. In Fury, you will be mashing the hell out of your buttons as furiously as possible. Ha ha! Get it?

When you first start Fury, you are greeted with the exact same tutorial that graces every other PC game ever made. If you're reading this, you already know what it is. WSAD moves, mouse moves the camera. 1-10 on your hotbar use abilities, just like in every other MMO ever made. The difference is that Fury has a hilarious, overdramatic tutorial narrator. Every time he says "the Fade" while explaining the world's lore and history, you will laugh.

After you are reminded that WSAD are the movement keys, you pick your class. If it weren't for a friend telling me to pick a specific class, I wouldn't have known what I was picking because they do not tell you a damn thing about them. They give you a lore background for each class, and I absolutely guarantee that if you are playing this game you do not care about the lore. You are here to fight people, and you're lucky because right after picking your class you start your first battle.

Congratulations, you just lost! I don't know if this game has the absolute worst matching system ever made, or if it doesn't even use one, but I was essentially wearing a towel and swinging a toothbrush around and I got slaughtered instantly by some guy decked out in mystical artifacts that were literally glowing with power.

With that said, you'd better have some friends because if you don't, boy howdy are you in for a treat! Do you like losing? You'd better; if you don't have friends backing you up you will get set up with the biggest group of uncoordinated retards to ever grace a video game. The game's coordination system is actually pretty solid. You can ping your minimap ("I just saw a guy right here!"), you can draw a line on it ("Let's run up this trench"), or you can set a marker ("THE FUCKING CRYSTALS ARE RIGHT HERE, YOU DOUCHEBAGS! STOP JERKING OFF AT THE SPAWN POINT AND GET US SOME POINTS!") and your team will see all three of those forms of communication.

The problem is that they will promptly ignore it and go about their business of dying horribly.

Now do you understand why I said this game was aptly named? It ignores what is essentially the 'Golden Rule' of MMOs, which is gating the amount of damage you deal. When I first started out, I realized I had no "mana" to speak of. I charged into battle and hoped for the best. As it turned out, every single one of my abilities had a cooldown time of less than a second and had no associated mana cost. Basically, I put my right hand on my mouse, my left hand on keys 1-4, and just pushed all four keys down as fast as I could. I actually dropped three other guys almost immediatly after respawning following my first death. Unfortunately, it didn't help us much when a ridiculous engine of destruction rounded the corner.

After the match ended, I was greeted to a large screen of loot. The way this works is the entire team picks from the pool of loot. You can either roll on 3 items, or roll on one item 3 times, or one item twice and one item once, some combination of 3. The unfortunate part is that the game never explains what any stats do so I just kind of guessed. "Physical Offense? I guess that means hitting things with my sword." (Note: It doesn't.) "I guess i'll pick that up! Hit points? Well, that's pretty universal, i'll get those too."

I got nothing, by the way.

Moving on, my friend guided me through the process of buying new skills. It's fairly straigh-tforward. You spend "Essence" which is basically experience, and if you care about lore (you don't), there's a nice background story explaining it. Basically, you've died about a thousand times and are reborn each time. You learn new abilities by unlocking past memories. I set myself up with new skills that I knew absolutely nothing about and the servers went down. When they came back up, my friend was gone and I was left to fend for myself for awhile. Things just got a whole lot worse from there.

First, I tried 'Elimination.' Elimination is actually exactly what I wanted out of this game. Two teams of 5 clash. When you die, you're out until the next round. Best out of 5 rounds win. We won 1. I managed three of the four kills that round and I had just started playing. That right there gives you an idea of the average level of the people you'll be playing with if you don't bring friends. Did I ever mention that nobody actually pays attention to the minimap? Maybe it's not their fault. Maybe it's just that they're stuck furiously mashing their buttons and trying to keep pace with the other team--who are leaping and frolicking like fucking jackrabbits--that they never actually got a chance to look.

I decided that playing with pickups would get me nowhere, and moved onto 'Bloodbath,' a 25-man free-for-all battle royale. "Hell, yes! This is going to rule!"

'Free for all' is a subjective term. By that, I mean there was a group of 5 people from the same guild roaming around and ganging up on people, but never each other. Towards the end of the match, they honest-to-God played Rock/Paper/Scissors to decide who in their little group was going to die. Once again, not having friends makes this a terrible experience.

The last mode has a name I can't even remember. It's essentially a capture-the-flag game requiring vast amounts of teamwork. You can forgive me not bothering with it; I played one round and by the end of it my friend was yelling at everyone for farming kills instead of completing objectives. Unfortunately, he picked the end of the match to explain this, as I didn't even know there WERE any fucking objectives because the game doesn't tell you anything about them. It mentions there are crystals, sure. But it also mentions there are crystals on the fucking elimination map (which doesn't actually have any).

Most people tend to talk about graphics in reviews, so i'll do that. You will spend 5 seconds going "Ooh, ahhh!", then you will turn everything down to "uglymode" because if you don't, your framerate will cause you to die before you know what hit you. Seriously. I have a very nice gaming rig and the game actually hung for so long at the cities' main spawn point that I had to hard shutdown my computer, then edit the settings from out-of-game. When I got back in it looked absolutely awful, but at least I could play. That's all there is to it.

All in all? I couldn't stand this game. I blame the match-making system, because it's either horribly broken or doesn't exist. If it were 5 drooling idiots versus 5 drooling idiots, I am not sure there would even be a problem. Unfortunantly, it usually seems it's 5 drooling idiots versus 5 incredibly skilled players decked out in artifacts blessed by God himself. If you have a bunch of friends, I suppose it would be better as that way you can be assured some coodrination and organization. If you're reading this, why don't you go and post on the HonestGamers forums to try getting a team set up? You'll have way more fun, I guarantee it.

However, I do believe Fury is a step in the right direction. Korea has grinding MMOs down to a science and nobody will compete with them. Right now--and perhaps this will change in the future--Blizzard has the casual "quest then raid" market on lockdown and nobody can touch them. Fury, however, is a 100% PVP MMO with a lot of great ideas, something no other game can attest to. There might be 100% pure PVP MMOs out there, but none of them are actually worth the free trial download because their ideas are garbage and the games themselves worse.

Rating: 6/10

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