Of all the games released during the Sega Genesis era, Comic Zone is one I constantly think about to this very day. While other games have long since adapted the feel of jumping from panel to panel inside a virtual comic book, few of them were ever as memorable. Fury Unleashed, an indie game by Awesome Games Studio, brings that aesthetic of jumping from page to page, blasting aliens and monsters alike, as it mimics the feel of a real comic book, all while telling a very engaging story about creative burnout and self-doubt.
Fury Unleashed is two parts Comic Zone, and equal parts Contra and Binding of Isaac, letting you run, dash, and blast your way through procedurally generated environments. You’ll play through a series of three comic books, all centered around Fury, the protagonist of a popular comic book series that takes place in that world. The game is largely about the relevance of Fury, their place in the world, and how the series, to many of its fans, has seen better days, all due to in part to the creative burnout of the comic’s own creator. This story is all too relatable to someone who’s actively tried to be creative for years, whether it’s redoing a review for the 5th time because I wasn’t exactly happy with it, restructuring their website over and over again, or the number of times I’ve tried to get back into drawing and just couldn’t. Fury Unleashed expertly nails this feeling and does a great job at finding its solution, even if the title could have done more with how it affected the game we were actually playing.
The game starts with your introduction to Mr. Doodle, a mysterious being that presses you on, hoping you find the resolve to keep going, to aid in finding out what is going on with your creator. He will interject at the end of each level, showing you bits of pieces of emails or conversations between your creator and other contributing factors to his burnout and self-doubt, such as an email demanding the deadlines for the new book be honored, despite the creator’s wishes for a break. I found these bread crumbs to align perfectly with the final encounter and it was rather impressive about how it all went down. It’s a very touching story that I truly hadn’t expected to come out of a gun-blasting contra-type shooter.
The most constant thought going through my head while I spent the day pushing through the game’s content is how fun the game feels. The controls are just tight enough to ensure that every double jump, dash, and bullet landed exactly where I needed it to. As I would engage in fast-paced battle with the game’s several bosses, dodging bullet-hell blasts, or leaping from platform to platform learning the variety of different patterns given to them, nothing ever got in the way of what I needed to do. Similar to a game like Dead Cells, every mechanic or aspect of mobility allows the game to just flow from battle to battle, ensuring that if you die, it’s entirely on you and not blamed on some aspect of its design or controls. I never once got mad at a death or felt that it was unfair, and that’s a delicate balance that developer Awesome Games Studio expertly nails.
Fury Unleashed can also be enjoyed alongside a friend in local 2-player co-op allowing all the shooting, jumping, and dashing to fill the screen as two players unleash hell. Thankfully, co-op shines here as you can easily phase through your companion instead of bumping into each other and causing unintended chaos. The only big difference here is that both players are required to move to the next screen at the same time, and from what I could tell, you can only resurrect your dead partner once the next level begins. For as enjoyable as the game is from a solo perspective, co-op certainly highlights the game’s strengths and makes for a very good time.
Told across three unique comic book environments, as well as a fourth mysterious location, each level is procedurally generated ahead of your arrival as you’ll see that very comic book being built in front of you with several small panels to large splash pages making up the structure of each issue. Each comic book will play host to three major bosses and several sub-bosses that are randomly placed during each run. As you flesh out an issue by defeating each of the three main threats, you’ll unlock the ability to start at the beginning of the following issue, instead of death placing you back at the very start of issue #1. It’s a great system to have you dive right back in and considering there are nearly 40 sub-bosses to encounter, I rarely ever got the same instance and always found something new on each subsequent run.
Much like Dead Cells, death is never the end. In fact, it’s how you’ll make each additional run in this rogue-lite more efficient and vastly more enjoyable. As you complete objectives or kill enemies, you’ll earn Black Ink, a currency used to earn you skill points. Skill points are then used to make you stronger, reload faster, hold more grenades, or a plethora of other skills that increase a vast array of stats and abilities. You can also customize Fury with a series of hairstyles, colors, and accessories, or additional player characters as you unlock them.
Combat sees you shooting, melee striking, or throwing out grenades, as well as a freezing skill that locks enemies in place for a short while. This ability can also be changed should you find a more suitable replacement as you explore, such as a turret or an airborne drone. Weapon variety is also rather impressive with dual pistols, submachine guns, shotguns, assault rifles, and a variety of rocket launchers and plasma beam cannons available as you find them, each with stats of their own. Shooting is performed by simply pointing the right analog stick, making shooting, and moving a breeze to do together. Continuing the slaughter of your foes will build up a combo meter, granting a better chance of enemies dropping health orbs as you keep the combo going, or special challenge portals that require a set combo limit to enter. Keeping the combo going higher will also result in enemies dropping more ink, so it pays to keep slaying as fast as possible.
During your onslaught, you’ll also pick up golden ink which will disappear from your inventory upon death and is used to purchase a variety of rare items and perks from mysterious characters you’ll encounter during your exploration. There are a variety of these vendors, such as offering health in exchange for random equipment or forming a pact with a devil type character that sees one bonus alongside one handicap as well. These characters can make certain runs very different from one another and can offer you up some very rare items to making killing that much more efficient. It’s a system that tends to reward itself for being used as killing faster and more efficiently results in more black and golden ink dropping from enemies, which then makes killing and upgrading that much faster. It’s a satisfying loop that always felt rewarding.
While Fury Unleashed does a great job at mimicking the panel system of a comic book, I do wish the storyline within the comic book itself was told through more art and comic book style moments, allowing the bosses and villains to stand out a bit more than they already do. Now, that said, those are minor issues in the grand scheme of things as frankly, the whole visual representation here is still extremely solid for a game made by half a dozen people. The large towering bosses down to the smallest threats are incredibly well detailed and simply look incredible. No matter how crazy some encounters got, the game never once dipped in performance, and I never once experienced any sort of glitch or problem during my time here. There are a ton of interesting bosses and enemies that always continued to impress as I would dive back into an issue to find a new sub-boss waiting for me that I had yet to encounter.
One last component to talk about is the game’s difficulty and some options that allow the game to be enjoyed by all. Fury Unleashed allows every aspect of its game to be tailored to not just your own personal skill level with variable difficulty levels, but the ability to disable blood and gore if you would want to play this with younger children. While the game is rated T for Teen, disabling this and lowering the difficulty can ensure that almost anyone can enjoy it. In fact, easy mode has additional sliders that allow you to change the level of damage you’re taking a receiving, making the game accessible to almost anyone.
Fury Unleashed was a nice surprise to dive into with fun engaging visuals and some spot-on controls that made every run a true delight. It’s fast, fluid, and comes packed with a surprisingly heartfelt story that is all too relatable. It may be a short experience if you tend not to dive back into finding everything the game can offer, but the variety on display here is solid enough to make you want to track down each and every boss, learning the patterns and mechanics that come with them. With solid local co-op gameplay, you can seriously tear things up alongside a friend, making the experience that much more engaging.
A review code of Fury Unleashed was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review and played on an Xbox One X.
All screenshots were taken on an Xbox One X.