Ion Fury

To understand Ion Fury, you have to understand the Build Engine. In the mid-90s, while id Software was pushing into true 3D with Quake, Ken Silverman’s Build Engine powered a trio of classics—Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and Shadow Warrior—that prioritized environmental interactivity and personality over technical purity. For decades, that engine was a relic. Then came Voidpoint.

Developed by a team of veterans and modders who know the Build source code inside out, Ion Fury isn’t a “retro-inspired” modern game; it is a genuine Build Engine title, albeit one modified to handle 21st-century resolutions and physics. It serves as a prequel to the underwhelming Bombshell, but calling it such feels like an insult. This is a standalone standout that puts Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison where she always belonged: in the middle of a high-speed, pixelated massacre.

Published by 3D Realms, the game positions itself as the rightful heir to the throne of the 90s PC shooter. It drops players into Neo D.C., a cyberpunk sprawl under siege by Dr. Jadus Heskel’s cybernetic cultists. There are no cinematic cutscenes to interrupt the flow, no tutorials to hold anyone’s hand, and certainly no regenerating health. It is a game of mechanical purity, demanding spatial awareness and twitch reflexes in equal measure. In a market saturated with “looter shooters” and live-service bloat, Ion Fury feels like a cold, refreshing splash of high-octane gasoline.

• The Loverboy Revolver: A signature weapon that defines the combat rhythm, featuring a multi-target lock-on secondary fire that clears rooms in a rhythmic burst of lead.
• True 2.5D Verticality: Unlike the flat planes of early 90s shooters, the levels here utilize sophisticated sector-over-sector design, creating massive, interconnected urban environments that encourage vertical exploration.
• Resource Management Philosophy: By eschewing modern conveniences like waypoints and auto-healing, the game forces players to engage with the environment to find secret stashes, armor shards, and health kits.
• Interactable Environments: From functioning light switches to vending machines and destructible scenery, the world feels lived-in and responsive, echoing the immersive simulation elements of the original Duke Nukem 3D.

The “boomer shooter” revival has seen its share of hits, but most rely on modern engines like Unity to mimic the past. Ion Fury takes the hard road, and the results are visceral. The gameplay loop is built entirely on momentum. Shelly Harrison moves with a frictionless agility that makes modern protagonists feel like they’re wading through molasses. This speed is a defensive necessity. In Neo D.C., standing still is a death sentence.

The Art of the Arsenal

The weapons are the game’s primary form of character development. Every gun has a distinct “weight” and a tactical secondary function. The Bowling Bombs are a standout—explosives that can be rolled along the floor to home in on enemies, turning the environment’s geometry into a weapon. The Disperser functions as both a shotgun and a grenade launcher, requiring the player to constantly switch modes to deal with shifting enemy types. This isn’t “spray and pray”; it’s a high-speed puzzle where the wrong tool leads to a quick reload.

Level Design as Narrative

Voidpoint’s seven zones are sprawling, hand-crafted labyrinths. The level design avoids the “corridor-room-corridor” trap of modern FPS titles. Instead, it leans into non-linear exploration. A keycard might sit behind a vent three floors up, and the path to it requires a combination of observation and platforming. This creates a sense of spatial mastery. By the time a player reaches the exit of a zone, they don’t just know the way out; they know the layout of the city block.

However, this complexity is a double-edged sword. The lack of waypoints is refreshing until it isn’t. Some maps are so dense with detail and looping paths that backtracking becomes an inevitability. Miss a specific switch or keycard hidden in a highly detailed corner, and the pacing grinds to a halt amid cleared-out streets. It’s a trade-off: deep immersion at the cost of occasional frustration.

The Hitscan Hurdle

The difficulty curve is unapologetic. While most projectiles can be dodged, Ion Fury relies heavily on hitscan enemies—foes whose bullets travel instantly. On higher difficulties, this can lead to “damage taxes” where health is lost the moment a corner is turned, before any reaction is possible. It forces a more cautious, “peek-and-fire” style of play that sometimes clashes with the high-speed movement the game otherwise encourages. It’s a relic of 90s design that could have benefited from a bit more modern tuning.

Visually, the game is a triumph of pixel-art engineering. The modified Build Engine allows for colored lighting, widescreen support, and thousands of frames of animation that would have melted a Pentium processor in 1996. The cyberpunk aesthetic is realized through vibrant purples, grays, and neon flickers, creating a gritty but readable world. The MIDI-inspired soundtrack is a pulse-pounding accompaniment that perfectly captures the “action-movie-on-a-floppy-disk” vibe. And as a 2D-sprite game of this scope, it is light on hardware by design—well suited to running smoothly on modest machines.

On Steam, the game is at its best. The precision of a mouse and keyboard is essential for the higher difficulty tiers, and the community-made mods and maps extend the game’s lifespan significantly.

The Nintendo Switch version is built to preserve the aesthetic integrity of the PC release, but the Joy-Con’s short analog sticks make precision aiming—particularly with the Loverboy’s lock-on—harder than it needs to be. Gyro aiming is a mandatory inclusion here, and it’s well-implemented. It’s a strong way to play on the go, provided the hardest “Ion Maiden” difficulty is left alone.

Ion Fury is a vital reminder that mechanical depth and environmental interactivity are timeless. While it occasionally stumbles over its own complexity and archaic difficulty spikes, the sheer joy of its combat and the brilliance of its level design make it a worthy heir to the Build Engine classics that inspired it. For anyone with love for the “Golden Age” of PC shooters, we rate it a clear recommendation—flawed, but absolutely worth the price of admission.