Chains of Fury Review

 Chains of Fury is a good ol’ classic-style first-person shooter developed by Cobble Games and published by Fulqrum Publishing. Inspired by the likes of Hellboy and Lobo comics; this brutal boomer shooter is aiming to turn up the testosterone levels to 11, full of blood, guts, and dark humour. While I don’t read those types of comics, I can appreciate a good ol’ massacre so let’s get right into it!

First off, I want to inform you all that Chains of Fury comes with its own launcher from Fulqrum Publishing. It is a little annoying being advertised to check out other games before I play the game I want to but it’s just one extra click, so it’s not too bad. Now let’s get into the game proper.

The story is rather light, only told with the occasional cutscenes and in-game text. You play as a very, very angry mercenary who ends up in prison because his former clients would rather do that than pay him. Helped by a mysterious benefactor, he’s now out for blood, ready to slay anything and everything in his path for payback. It’s nothing personal, it’s just revenge.

Chains of Fury is presented like a comic book, where all the different levels are issues in a collection and are styled as such, with cel-shading and comic book-style cutscenes to show off its influences. However, any additional information or lore sort of goes by the wayside. For one thing, there isn’t much voice acting other than one-liners to indicate how PO’d your character is. It’s barely understandable too. Also, your benefactor only talks through dialogue boxes, which you won’t be focusing on when you’re knee-deep in a fight. I tried to pay attention, but I was too busy not dying to really notice when they did talk. The music is pretty rocking though, with a nice metal soundtrack to get your adrenaline pumping, especially when you fly into a Rage. But before all that, let’s talk about shooting.

You have a variety of weapons to choose from like a revolver, a machine gun, a grenade launcher, a crossbow, and even a BFG. They’re unlocked by racking up a cumulative high score, which means the higher your combos and the more treasure you collect, the sooner you unlock stuff. You can only carry two weapons with you and only one type of armour so you’ll have to figure out what fits your playstyle and what the level may require. However, I couldn’t bring myself to ever unequip the shotgun just because of how good it is, and the grenade launcher had the ability to destroy fungus-blocked areas, so I stuck with those two weapons for a good part of the game. Even the BFG turned out to be extremely underwhelming, considering its item description says that using it will “win the game” when all it did was sweet FA. There are also different types of fists to use, one of which gives you access to a chain that can allow you to grapple to specific points, pull enemies in, or pull you in. It’s a little finicky though, and you have to switch to your fists to use it, which didn’t make it the most useful part of my arsenal. Besides, you can beat levels without it, it just makes platforming a little easier. It is still useful for knocking down fragile walls and bashing down doors though.

However, the… oh god, I don’t know his name. Erm… Bob (please correct me) here is a very angry person. The more he kills, the angrier he gets. Keeping his anger up is part of the combo system, which allows you to gain more points the more enemies you kill in a row. You also have a Fury gauge, which is filled by, well, killing stuff. If you get multi-kills, you gain significant chunks of Fury. Once you’ve filled up your Fury meter, you can go into Rage Mode where you’re invincible, have infinite ammo, grants weapons serious buffs such as no cooldowns or a second gun, and enemies will also drop more health and ammo. While Rage Mode will only last 10 seconds at most, killing will extend the timer. If you know the level well enough, you can get through the entire thing without losing it. It also allows you to see enemies through walls which helps keep it going, but since everything becomes grayscale, you could easily find yourself firing into a wall. Still, it’s pretty fun. I was able to easily beat the first boss with only one trigger of Rage Mode because it kept spawning enemies for me to kill. And since I could still pick up ammo while in this mode, I ended up passively farming over 1000 ammo for each gun I brought with me. Satisfying, but probably a little broken since ammo carries over from level to level. This was on Normal difficulty and not the sissy and babified Easy, as the game very clearly didn’t like including.

I should also point out that A.I. isn’t very smart. Most of the time they’re just standing there until you show up, in which they’ll charge at you or start shooting. They don’t really do much, even when you’re filling them with buckshot so despite the variety of enemy designs, they just became target practice.

I’m gonna stop praising Chains of Fury from this point onwards, because… goddamn, despite it saying that it is fully released, I can confidently tell you that is a lie. It should be on Early Access. It’s really telling of the amount of issues I ran into because, as I’m writing this review, I see that it’s taking up the entire second half of this article!

Let’s talk about the design issues first. The level design and colour palette can be your worst enemy, as what could be one solid piece of flooring could actually have holes to fall into if you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. It also attempts to do first-person platforming, which is always hit-or-miss unless there’s a real focus on it. And there isn’t.

There are no autosaves, so dying will either kick you out of the level or make you revert to your last save, so I recommend making it a habit to save manually and rotate your saves because the game can crash or screw you over by trapping you in a slow death, and I don't want anyone to be forced to replay an entire level. Actually, here’s a warning: do not kill yourself with a grenade launcher. That’s how you crash the game. 

It lacks feedback when picking up items like treasure and ammo. Sure, there’s a sound effect but it’s soft and it doesn’t always play so I got into the habit of double-checking if I picked it up. Also, ammo and health dropped by enemies disappear way too fast. It’s like 10 seconds before it pops out of existence, which really sucks when you’re out of ammo and your only attack is punching.

Now onto glitches and unintended features, such as walls and floors not having collision, where it’s likely you may end up clipping through something, or drop through the level and forcing a restart. For some reason, despite keeping the language in English, some of the text suddenly switched to another language, causing issues like missing letters and different words to appear when hovering over a button.

I also ran into some really baffling problems, such as enemies spawning directly in front of you, wonky hitboxes that make explosive barrels kind of unreliable to hit, and sometimes my gun doesn’t shoot. There’s no jamming mechanic or something with the fire rate or anything, it just… doesn’t, and I have to switch to my other gun.

And finally, the achievements don’t stack. If you play the game on Normal, you won’t unlock the achievements for beating levels on Easy.

At least it runs well, I guess. On my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, the game stayed at a consistent framerate… on the first play session. Afterwards, and this may just be me not noticing until then, but every time I killed an enemy with my shotgun outside of Rage Mode, it would freeze for just a second.

To hammer in the final nail in this coffin, when I played Chains of Fury, there were only eight levels, making for a rather short playthrough of 3.4 hours. Doesn’t sound all that bad, there are definitely games that have similar playtimes. But if you check the logo, it is currently on Volume 1. From the comic collection, it’s expected there will be 28 levels, four per chapter, which means there will be two to three more volumes/major updates. God forbid you need to buy the other volumes separately. I think you should stay away from this game until they come out. The gameplay is not bad by any means, it’s actually quite fun, but I had to push through all the glitches, terrible design decisions, and lack of polish that make it very obvious that Chains of Fury isn’t quite ready.