Full Metal Furies

PC, Xbox One

There are moments where Furies feels like a real battle, its victories hard-won

Developer/publisher Cellar Door Games Format PC, Xbox One (tested) Release Out now

Co-op indie brawlers aren’t hard to find: close your eyes and walk in any direction, and chances are you’ll bump into one eventually. But Full Metal Furies, according to Cellar Door Games, is “an action RPG with a twist” – a prospect sure to make any Rogue Legacy fan salivate. Here’s the real surprise: Cellar Door’s attempt at the genre isn’t a revelation. It’s adept, encouraging tactical play and containing an RPG system that helps incentivise swinging hammers and taking names. The boisterous fun is undermined by a niggling disbelief, as we poke around in Furies’ corners for a bit of brilliance. No such luck: it remains simply, stubbornly, a semi-decent brawler, and little more.

In fairness, the bar was set high. Rogue Legacy, Cellar Door’s debut, was a delicious riff on the Roguelike genre. Furies, by comparison, is fairly by-the-numbers. You must save Athens from ruin by methodically bashing your way through hordes and Titan bosses, plus plenty of questionable gags (2011, we’re told, would like its memes back).

At least the four playable characters are somewhat likeable, bouncily drawn and animated, tragically flattened into pixelated sprites in combat. Tanky shield-bearer Triss, acrobatic fighter Alex, Erin the tech-focused Engineer and near-sighted sniper Meg: each Fury serves a distinct purpose. In singleplayer, you’re able to select two at a time, switching between them during fights to take advantage of their varying class-based talents. Each possesses a primary and secondary ability, an evasive manoeuvre and a special attack. Juggling them all presents a stern challenge, with one eye kept on the cooldowns ticking down, and another on hails of bullets being spewed towards you.

A successful assault on a horde of enemies is often achieved by cancelling regular or secondary abilities into powerful moves, or creating big-damage combos between characters. The latter is gratifying in solo play: it becomes second nature to use Triss’ shield-smash to launch an enemy and follow up with her AOE shout to land a critical hit, or to press a button to tag in Meg and her special attack, sniping foes from the air in bullettime. In co-op, however, team-based combos are harder to coordinate. The action is frenzied and reactive by nature, with everyone focused on simply staying alive.

Like Rogue Legacy, Furies can be unrelentingly tough. But while flexible fighting and varied upgrades equip players to face its most brutal tests, strange design decisions constantly thwart your progress. The game’s revive system is particularly galling: should your other character or teammate fall, you can speed up their resuscitation by standing over them and holding a button. An evasive move can only do so much: for five seconds, the enemies surrounding you are free to clobber you, leaving you near death by the time your buddy is back on their feet.

In singleplayer, it’s less of an issue. Your fallen character is granted a decent chunk of HP, their evasive manoeuvre likely off cooldown, helping give your poor, battered lifesaver a break. In multiplayer, however, a resurrected pal returns with a single point of HP: they are nearly-dead weight until auto-recovery eventually kicks in. Losing one teammate is often the beginning of the end in twoplayer sessions. Tank Triss becomes an indispensable pick, able to huddle behind her shield-block and revive in relative safety. Even in fourplayer co-op, where a Triss is guaranteed, anyone playing her inevitably ends up on babysitting duty. It’s an exasperating design, and a puzzling one given the developer’s pedigree. Rogue Legacy took the Roguelike’s punishing permadeath and transformed a ‘game over’ screen into something worth celebrating. By contrast, a death in Furies disrupts any rhythm its combat has helped to build. It’s checkpointed generously, at least, and you keep all the gold earned in a level even if it’s failed. But bumping up against a tough boss can become a grind as a result. One fight built for ranged firepower sees us mindlessly mashing through it until we earn the gold to unlock an upgrade for Meg that grants extra damage on consecutive hits. Afterwards, it’s a cakewalk.

But there are also moments where Furies feels like a real battle, its victories hard-won. As you progress through the secret-filled world, you meet new foes: bombers that rain missiles; commanders dashing about with electrified swords; trombonists tooting enemybuffing melodies; various types of mildly irritating turrets. Learning how to prioritise each, scraping past a level through careful positioning and timing, feels like an achievement – especially when altering your loadout to gain the edge over a certain enemy. Coloured bubble enemy shields that require specific characters of corresponding colour to break do force you to switch it up in singleplayer, or coordinate more effectively in multiplayer. Mind you, we could do without the white invincibility bubbles, which add artificial difficulty and empty seconds to encounters until they disappear.

In other words, the Full Metal Furies experience is as patchy in the hands as its attempts at humour. And we do use the term loosely. One minute, you’re grinning at a boss’ lengthy name spilling over its health bar, or a canny reminder that you can skip cutscenes; the next, you’re gritting your teeth at a dreadfully played-out gag. You may rejoice at the way a last-second dodge or a flawlessly executed air crit feels, but you’ll despair at the hurdles the game inexplicably builds in front of you. Worst of all, there’s no mad twist of genius to be found anywhere. Yes, in the grand scheme of things, Furies is a fine co-op indie brawler – but if we were you, we’d open our eyes and keep on walking.