3D Realms Took Criticism of Its New Boomer Shooter Badly. Phantom Fury Turned out to Be Disappointment
Phantom Fury failed to turn out to be a worthy successor to Ion Fury. The game is getting mixed reviews on Steam, and its situation is worsened by 3D Realms' behavior.
Yesterday, Phantom Fury, a boomer shooter and a sequel to the popular Ion Fury, was released on Steam. Players who were expecting a worthy follow-up were deeply let down, and this also led to significant controversies surrounding the game's publisher's conduct.
- On Steam, only 60% of the reviews are positive, which the service categorizes as a "mixed" reception of the title.
- Players are unhappy with the low technical polish, weak enemy AI, and overall average gameplay. The reception by the industry media is slightly better - the game has an average rating of 70% according to Metacritic.
- Even worse, the title is probably selling poorly. It has 88 reviews on Steam, and the record of activity on the day of release was only 381 players playing at the same time. For comparison, Ion Fury's record is 1,471 people playing simultaneously.
The negative reception of the game is also reinforced by the behavior of the developers. Leaked screenshots show internal conversations between employees of the publisher and developer, in which they challenge YouTubers creating critical content about productions released under the 3D Realms banner, including negative reviews of Phantom Fury. The company representative apologized for the incident, but also threatened to sue the former employee who shared them with the public.
Reports of banning on the Steam forum for expressing negative opinions also surfaced, but it was a misunderstanding. This player was supposed to be banned by Valve itself for something completely different, serving as an example.
It should be clarified here that the game wasn't developed by the Voidpoint studio known from Ion Fury. Phantom Fury is developed by the Slipgate Ironworks team. Unfortunately, this is another disappointing game from this developer, following Kingpin: Reloaded and the 1.0 version of GRAVEN. All three projects were clearly released too early. In the case of Phantom Fury, there are even frequent opinions that this title strongly required at least an additional 12 months of production.
This is even more disturbing because last year's Phantom Fury demo also turned out to be a disappointment, and yet the developers didn't draw any conclusions from it.
