Phantom Fury Review — Bombshell

Phantom Fury is a cross between a boomer shooter and a classic American action movie, combining bombastic violence and quirky quips with fast-paced gameplay and beautiful graphics. The game takes a nontraditional approach to level design that, while certainly interesting, can fight player expectations and, at times, make navigation a bit frustrating. It will, however, make for a game you’re sure not to forget.

Phantom Fury follows Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison, a protagonist from another game I haven’t played but one I quickly fell for with her constant quips and badass hero nature. It is hard not to enjoy a character who punches through a line of baddies and then says something purposefully sarcastic or corny before whipping out a minigun and taking out the rest of them. It’s a classic sort of Snake Pliskin/Action Protagonist parody that feels like a love letter to the movies I grew up on.

Something you’ll notice right away is just how good the game looks. Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison and the rest of Phantom Fury are made to look like a low poly, 90’s era shoot-em-up, but with super high res models, giving the game a retro-callback but undeniably modern look. On top of that, it’s almost surreal just how smooth and animated everything is. Characters move with such a high FPS budget, and even little animations (like watching Shelly raise her hand to interact with a keypad) had me staring in a few extra moments of awe and appreciation.

The game jumps between levels that feel like classic DOOM, road trip-style explorations of various American frontiers, and even goes into horror a bit with its creepy mutants and the cramped, dark levels you face them in. Can you guess what my favorite of these were? It was the mutants, of course. Love those creepy guys.

We follow Bombshell on an old-school FPS shoot-em-up journey across the good old USA, with gameplay that feels like something like a cross between Quake and Half-Life. Emphasis on Quake because Phantom Fury is an incredibly fast-feeling game; You move quickly, aim quickly, and shoot quickly, or you die. I appreciate it, even if I’m not very good at it.

The game has about 20 unique weapons that beautifully complement the fast-paced combat, from traditional shotguns and miniguns to unique options like bowling-ball bombs that you have to roll at your enemies.

Unfortunately, the pace of the game’s fast combat can immediately be broken by trying to figure out how to move forward after all the enemies are dead.

When I say I was always getting lost, I’m not exaggerating. Obvious paths your brain might expect to take are blocked off and replaced by shape turns just out of your eyeliner, or at times, completely hidden until you stumble into just the right angle to find them. The game uses clearly unique “gate-unlocking” mechanics but hides these not-so-obvious paths between unmarked, unobvious areas your brain isn’t trained to spot easily. For me, the game’s exciting fast pace would halt as I ran in circles, trying to find the way forward for every locked path.

A big reason why so many of these paths were hidden is also due to an unfortunate lack of consistency in the game. One room will have you move a box into position and hop a fence, only for the next to use an easily jumpable fence as an invisible wall to prevent progress. Another might have you punch open a grey metal door, only for all the rest of said doors throughout the level to be locked and unpunchable. It gives the game a bad habit of training you to expect one thing, only for that thing to never operate that way again—or if it does, it will do so only have several instances of the rule being broken.

It isn’t that I hate the game’s nontraditional level design. The ways of unlocking paths are definitely unique, and the game will then throw something awesome at you, like flying a jet through a canyon or scuba diving in enemy waters. I just feel like the game unnecessarily makes it a bit of a puzzle to find the special paths forward it wants you to take.

For lack of a better analogy, the game doesn’t have enough “yellow-painted cliffs” for its design. I’m sure the former, at least, is something a lot of players will disagree with, and hey, maybe some people will have less trouble navigating than me, but I felt like the pace of the levels was severely slowed by how frequently I found myself lost.

To close out this review, I would also point out that the game had a surprisingly lackluster soundtrack. For me, games like DOOM are built on the blood-pounding score blasting in your ears as you blast into your enemies. Phantom Fury would have greatly benefited from an 80s synth-wave OST (something like Hotline Miami, maybe?). However, I found that when I was blasting enemies, the music was so quiet and unnoticeable that it might as well not have been there.

Though I have reservations, Phantom Fury is still a great shooter with much to offer. Some players will certainly be able to circumvent the areas that I complained about in their own playthroughs. Still, even if you experience the same pace-fighting confusion I did, the game is worth playing and will certainly win back your goodwill with some of its more action-packed and exciting moments.

Try Hard Guides received a PC review code for this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Phantom Fury is available on Steam and GoG.