Fury (PC) review "It's a lot of hassle to go through for a game that's just very...bland. Fury isn't exactly bad at what it does, but what it does is so limited that it's hard to take it seriously when compared to other bigger MMOs. What Fury is, is an MMO devoted entirely to PVP, and where the game runs into problems is that there's no less grind than other MMOs."

If Fury did one thing that really impressed me, it was start off on the wrong foot faster than nearly any game I've ever seen. In fact, Fury was setting off all manner of warning bells before the game actually started. After the install, I was required to download somewhere in the ballpark of 1200mb of patch files to even play the game. That's almost two CD's worth of extra data. This isn't remarkable in and of itself for an MMO, except that Fury wasn't even a month old at the time. A trip to the patch notes section of their web page showed that all these massive files were, in fact, not extra content, but bug fixes and balance tweaks.

I know it's become normal to release games before they're finished, but shouldn't there be at least some standards? Isn't the game's beta supposed to weed out at least a good deal of the bugs? Obviously hot fixes are fine. I'm all for improving PC titles during their lifetime, but it seems like Fury was kicked out of the door before it was ready to walk on its own. It's just a little ridiculous to require the reinstallation of 1/3rd of the game's total size immediately upon release. No less, the process took something like three hours, and in the week that followed, I was blessed to sit through another half hour or so of additional patching.

It's a lot of hassle to go through for a game that's just very...bland. Fury isn't exactly bad at what it does, but what it does is so limited that it's hard to take it seriously when compared to other bigger MMOs. What Fury is, is an MMO devoted entirely to PVP, and where the game runs into problems is that there's no less grind than other MMOs.

At first, it doesn't seem like that will be the case. There are no levels, after all, and you character's potential is expressed in more discrete ways, such as gear and abilities. The system itself is sort of neat. When you start the game, you have one set of beginner gear for pretty much any role you could want, and from there you can branch off as you will. From there, you gain abilities at your discretion, and at any time you can switch your specialization. There are no concrete 'classes' in Fury.

The chief way to gain abilities, however, is through obtaining Fury points, which you collect based on your performance in the game's instanced arena battles. But abilities aren't cheap, and there are lots of them, so it's really just a gauntlet of repetitive objectives separated by absurd loading times repeated infinitely.

And then there's gear. New equipment is mostly obtained after the same battles as the fury points. This gear is dropped at random, and then rolled on by the participating players. The downside to this is that it can take a long time to both find and buy gear that you want. There's a certain frustration factor involved in that, as it can be some time before you see anything that really benefits the character that you want to make.

The point of all this ranting isn't to suggest that the problem is, specifically, that the game is a grind. MMO's are, after all, little more than games for people who enjoy grinding. The biggest flaw is that there is basically no variation in the grind itself. Really good MMO's give you choices. There are a number of ways to grind and different concrete rewards to be gained for each path you take. In Fury, you fight a bunch of people in an arena, or fight a bunch of people in territory control, and that's it.

The problem with Fury isn't necessarily that it's more repetitive than other games, it's that it feels more repetitive than other games. It does nothing to mask the fact that you're doing the same thing over and over, and throws lots of long loading times at you in order to drive the point home. There's some neat ideas here, a pure PVP MMO could be really interesting, especially with the near infinite customizability it offers. A shame that it's just a drag to play.

Freelance review by Josh Higley (December 07, 2007) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.