“Pretty sure the big flaming “F” on the box stands for failure.”

As an avid MMO player with three level 70s in World of Warcraft, I always hated the idea of grinding for experience. It seems so archaic. There is little fun to be had in killing the same thing over and over just to increase your numerical value by one digit. Fury appeals to the idea that grinding is for suckers. So when I heard that a company was claiming they had a game that would redefine PvP, I jumped at the chance to review it.

Auran, the games developer, is attempting to cater to the gamers who tried titles like WoW and Guild Wars only to be disappointed due to boredom, or did not want to invest the time it takes to get a high level character. In fact the city chat in Fury is filled almost exclusively with people bashing WoW.

It is this type of gamer that Fury seems to be catering to, as the game offers absolutely no leveling in terms of character progression. The idea behind this is that the characters in Fury are all legendary figures brought back to fight and collect essence to power their respective sanctuary. However, I felt that this message was poorly conveyed and felt more like an excuse than a fleshed out storyline.

The first thing you must tackle after installing the game is the account set up process. After reading on the box that the game was “free”, I was very surprised to find out they offer an optional subscription service. There is a somewhat long list of features that are only offered in the subscription plan.

The pricing structure is very similar to Hellgate London, in that players can opt to get a few extra perks, and a little bit more content each month if they elect to pay a small monthly fee. In other words, while the game can be played for free, you won’t get the full experience that way. Fury Costs $9.99 a month, and for fans of the game, it seems like a pretty fair deal.

After downloading and installing the necessary patches, you’ll be prompted to create your first character. Make sure you like the name, because there are no extra character slots. Additionally you can never delete your character. When asked to comment on this, Lead Developer Adam Carpenter went on to say, “Really at the end of the day there’s no reason to have a second character, since your avatar can have as many as a dozen items, and you can learn every single ability in the game. So having a second character doesn’t really afford you any opportunities.” Additionally, players can also modify the appearance of their characters anytime during gameplay.

The first thing you’ll notice upon starting the tutorial and walking around the game world is the graphics. It really looks like the engine could have used a few more months in development. Running on a high end system that can play Bioshock with settings turned on high, Fury brought framerates to a grinding halt. The visuals just don’t seem proportionate to the performance. In addition the overall aesthetics could have used some work. There really isn’t anything unique in the art direction for Fury. It looks boring and drab, there is nothing here to differentiate it from any other Fantasy RPG.

While wrapping up the tutorial portion of the game, one thought seared through my mind like the flames surrounding the games four letter logo: “I know these guys are from Australia, but did they really need to hire Nicole Kidman to do the voice over?” Now, I am pretty sure the VO was not Nicole Kidman, but my point is that it was dry, repetitive, and at times excruciatingly annoying as it stated “Please choose your archetype….Please choose your archetype…Please choose your archetype” over and over again. You could say that this aspect of the game left me FURY-ious (Yeah, I said it). Thinking of this woman being mauled by a bear was probably the single highest moment I experienced while playing this game.

After the tutorial you are asked to choose your archetype (sound familiar?), and your choices are as follows: life, growth, death, decay, as well as melee, or spiritual. Choose quickly, though, because in case you forget, you will be prodded relentlessly to do so by Nicole’s evil twin.

You gain new skills as well as essence as you perform your chosen archetype’s attacks in combat. For instance, if you kill three people with a death spell, you will then gain death essence to spend on new skills. Each new skill requires that you go through a trial in order to obtain it. Don’t worry though, you won’t actually have to do anything complicated in these trials. Simply click through the cliché fantasy dialogue and bam, you have a new fireball spell!

This brings me to one of the most promising features in Fury– the ability to switch your incarnation (character class) on the fly. For instance, say your group needs a life archetype, all you need to do is spend some equipment points, and throw a few healing spells onto your “hotbar”.

Players have 1,000 equipment points at their disposal, and each piece of armor, as well as every weapon in the game will cost you a certain amount of equipment points to add on. This mechanic works well, as it gives you the option to change your class, but also makes sure you don’t load up your characters hotbar with every Archetype specific spell available in the game at once.

Actual image of me playing in the game

Considering the difficulty of getting a healing class in almost any other MMO, Fury’s approach to this aspect of gameplay is refreshing. Sadly though, very few players that I came across were actually using the life archetype. After all, who wants to run around healing, when they could be killing instead?

The game’s PvP arenas are set in epic landscapes, with Unreal Tournament style powerups strewn throughout. All character progression is earned in these battlefields, spanning from Icy Villages to Ancient Ruins. This is the bread and butter of Fury.

If they nailed one thing about Fury, it would hands-down be the environments. It’s a shame however, that the combat system makes for confrontations that are nowhere near as interesting as the surroundings they take place in.

About one third of the attack animations never seemed to materialize on screen. It often ended up looking like you were running around staring at your enemies, waiting to get slaughtered. When they did work, it felt very similar to the new style of combat regurgitated onto Star Wars Galaxies. This is NOT a good system to model your game after.

Auran tried to make actions feel fast, and twitch based. However it turned into a button mashing bout, as the poor use of on-screen cues meant to highlight “cooldown” periods often left you unsure about which attacks were available. The idea was for you to look at the bar on the bottom of the screen, but doing so in a fast paced battle type environment just doesn’t work. A better approach may have been to apply a thin border to the screen edges that changed color based on what attacks you had available.

When it comes to options, the inclusion of only three types of PvP modes, Vortex (Capture the Flag), Elimination (Team Deathmatch), and Bloodbath (Deathmatch) is simply inexcusable. They get old very quickly, and not being able to implement different objectives for each warzone, something that you think would be a no-brainer, was very disappointing.

Actual footage of me playing in the game

Getting slaughtered seems to be the theme of combat in Fury. The customer service rep assured me that the matchmaking feature was in place and working properly, however, it seemed to match up players at random. Every warzone I went into had people with far better gear than I did, which meant three or four hits would constantly put me out of commission. I discussed this with Adam, and he stated, “You can get decent matches right now, but they’re harder to come by because populations are low.”

When you’re not getting your ass kicked in the warzones, you will be taken to a sanctuary, Sanctarum, the game’s one and only city. Here you can meet up with other players to buy and sell items won on the battlefield, and to make pre-made PvP groups. Sadly there is very little positive interaction here, as most of the chat boils down to how WoW is for babies. However, I did manage to pin down a well-geared, high-ranked player for a short interview. Meet Merr!

Me: Can you please state your title and incarnation (character class) for our readers?

Merr: My name is Merr and I am an Overlord.

Me: What games, specifically MMOs, have you played in the past?

Merr: I have played WoW and Guild Wars.

Me: What aspects of Fury interested you before you bought the game, then to follow up, have your expectations been met?

Merr: I expected a PvP game and maybe a little more, but mostly my expectations have been met. It’s a casual in-between game.(Between two big games)

Me: Fury as a whole wasn’t on a lot of gamers’ radar, do you think this title has the potential to be a sleeper hit? Or do you see it fizzling out after a few months?

Merr: I think it will be an under the radar hit, but might fizzle out in about a year.

Me: Have you experienced any technical problems? Such as rubber banding, or frame rate issues?

Merr: Not so far, however I think this game will experience some problems, because there’s probably going to be a lot of patches.

Me: If you could change one thing about the game, what would it be?

Merr: I would add more PvP types, because if its based on PvP there should be more than three types of gameplay.

My hats goes off to Merr, as the Overlord was clearly able to stomach much more than I could in regards to this game.

So what happened to Fury? Was it doomed since they announced the price point was going to be 50$? Especially seeing as how most other MMOs in the same price range have PVE content to go along with the PvP experience. I asked Adam what factors they considered when deciding on a price. “Primarily so that the box price point is competitive with WoW and Guild Wars, and also with FPS games and other things from that genre. So we figured that it would be appropriate to charge that much at retail since we’re offering the same value you would get from your typical FPS, with the additional value of persistence from an MMO.”

How can a game like Fury compete in an extremely competitive market? What makes this game different from WoW and Guild Wars, Fury’s main competition? Mr. Carpenter went on to state, “Primarily that we are one hundred percent pure PvP. Where as those two are hybrid games, and many times I think of them as bi-polar games. Because the developers are constantly having to focus on whether some aspect of PvP is impacting PvE and vice versa. How we’re planning on competing is just too keep ourselves distinct, and now we can focus on making things as fun as possible for PvP without having to make sacrifices for PvE.”

Can any game hope to compete against the 9 million strong cultural Phenomenon that is World of Warcraft? Not if they turn out like Fury. I couldn’t even recommend this game to those who don’t enjoy the traditional MMO. There simply isn’t enough game here to sink your teeth into. I could run around most MMORPGs for weeks and not come close to seeing all the content implemented. Alternatively, you could play Fury for about three days, and see all the content the game has to offer.

The games box features a quote stating “This is PvP Reborn”, well if that’s the case, safe sex would have been a better way to go. One can only hope the Australian-based development company learns from the mistakes they made this time around, and improves upon what, in theory, has the potential to be a nice addition for fans of this genre.

Tags: Adam-Carpenter, Auran, Fury, Gamecock

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