Fractal Fury is a newly released Third-Person Shooter, that has one standout feature, which separates it from the competition. This is the ability to dismember enemy players.
If you would remove this feature from the game, than Fractal Fury would certainly be a disappointing game. The visuals are very basic. Environments are nearly nonexistent and all maps are just varieties of differently coloured walls and ramps. Most of the walls, which can be used as cover, are actually destructible and the Hardcore/Battle Royale map at least has multiple floor levels, what gives it more variety than the dull other ones. Every of the four game modes has only one map for them and with the exception of Hardcore, they are all really small and boring.
There are a couple of customizability options in the menu (like extensive visual options, controls and sound), which is commendable. Customizing controls and visuals worked fine for me, but customizing the sound completely failed. Changing the sound volume had no impact whatsoever. Even worse, the gunshot sounds seem to be extremely buggy. When I was shooting a fusillade of shots, than I could see the gunshots coming out of the weapon continuously, but the gunshot sound kept skipping out, which is very irritating in combat. The mainmenu Soundtrack is quite decent and soundeffects are also not bad, when they work correctly (Loading screens also deserve a praise, since they consist of moving vector lines and stars in the background, which look quite nice).
Players embody robotic characters with removable body parts, which reminded me a lot of the Terminator endoskeletons. Gunplay is very simple and for the most parts works relatively well. The biggest issues I have with it are, aside from the sound issues, the hit detection and the lack of variety. The rifle shoots somewhat accurate, but hit detection isn't always spot on and some dismemberments feel a bit to random. I understand that some body parts like legs or heads are easier removed than the torso, but the damage doesn't always seem comprehensible (Sometimes you can hit the torso 20-30 times without any feedback, while other times it breaks after 2-3 shots).
If one of the characters loses his head, the controls get inverted. If one leg is shot of, the robot can't run anymore. If he loses both legs, he will crawl. If you remove one arm, than he can't reload anymore and if you remove two arms the character obviously can't shoot anymore. Damaging the torso reveals the energy core (like a heart for the robot) and if you destroy that, the opponent is killed. It is also possible to walk upon another player and destroy his core manually, if it's already reveiled and he is incapable of interrupting you. Alternatively damaged players can also repair the character at robot fixing stations, which remove all damage within a few seconds. So this dismemberment feature is by far the coolest and best part of Fractal Fury.
There are 4 different game modes. Team Deathmatch is exactly like in every other game. Two teams fight each other till the team with more eliminations finally wins. Capture the Flag plays on the same map as TDM and also doesn't really do anything different than CTF modes in other games. It seems however like it is even more a viable strategy in Fractal Fury CTF to just run towards the flag and ignore all combat, since the robot armour kind of protects the players more against incoming damage. Hardcore on the other hand is sort of a round based Battle Royale mode. Up to 16 players can participate and the minimum amount of rounds is 5. Whoever is the last character alive at the end of the most rounds is the winner of the match. The map is much bigger and more interesting than the boring and small maps of the other modes, but still among the worst in the BR genre. There is also shrinking circle, which makes the playable area smaller during the rounds. The only really annoying aspect of Hardcore is, that the game gets unable to cope if a new player joins during the middle of a round. The game will than not give the win to the last surviving player but the new spectating one (sometimes the match even crashes because of this). They really need to fix this.
The last mode is the single player Horde mode. This is a round based survival mode. In theory this is entertaining for the first 2-3 rounds, buts gets chaotic and frustrating afterwards. The first wave consists of 10 hostile robots and they double after each wave, which means that the later waves will have 100+ enemies on the screen at the same time, which proves too much for this smaller game. My PC doesn't have any problems displaying far more demanding games, but the amount of enemies on screen gives my PC serious Lags and Framerate issues after wave 4-5. There is also no enemy variety, just the same generic AI robots all over again. The only difference between the Horde mode and the TDM/CTF map is that a few ramps got placed differently (these maps are really awful and look like they come straight out of a very basic texture creator tool).
I liked the Hardcore mode the most since the dismemberment and the ability to repair played the biggest role in this mode. TDM was second best and still some good fun. CTF however didn't really seem to fit the game and the horde mode may be theoretically interesting, but in practise was rather boring and clunky due to technical problems.
A positive aspect of Fractal Fury is, that it has full LAN support and lets you play all modes locally with friends (if that is something that you want to do and you can convince other people of wanting that too). The game on the other hand also has a couple of significant technical issues. I was multiple times either incapable to connect to other lobbies, being disconnected during a match or incapable of hosting an own match. This game is still very new and after a couple of minutes i was usually able to connect to or start a new match, but it is something to be aware of.
The lack of variety is also a big problem of this game. There is currently only a single weapon and only one halfway decent map. This is just not enough to keep most players interested for longer than a handful of hours due to the current repetitiveness of the game. I hope they improve this in the future or the game will not be able to maintain their player count (which is not gigantic anyway, but decent for a one person developer game; currently around 20-30 concurrent players daily).
Pro:
- Dismemberment feature
- Multiple gamemodes (including full LAN support)
- Gameplay essentially works
Contra:
- Basic and under average visuals
- Multiple technical issues (Server connection, Sound)
- Lack of variety (way too repetitive; only 1 weapon and only 2 real maps)
- Hit detection still too inconsistent
Result:
Without the dismemberment feature this would probably be a disappointing under average game, that doesn't look great, has sound and other technical issues and additionally lacks of content. I would probably rate this 3-4/10. The dismemberment on the other hand is pretty cool and entertaining, but I can't just give this a great score based on this feature alone. The gunplay is still too inconsistent as well as repetitive and the maps and modes still require improvement. Despite overall being only mediocre at the moment, I would still recommend trying Fractal Fury out for the dismemberment feature alone.
5/10
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