Shelly you jest
Well, assuming you’re not Matt Cox - inour review of the main game, he deemed it an experience in which “old-school decisions too often trump good ones” and “a blast from a past I never lived through”, concluding that “Ion’s tongue might be in its cheek, but I’ve got little interest in what it’s saying.” Ouch. Still, Steam user verdicts are markedly more enthusiastic, and what kind of jaded soul would turn his nose up at a Cluster Shot launcher with bouncing bullets? Bouncing bullets, Matt.
The Aftershock story begins shortly after the original game’s conclusion, with protagonist Shelly Harrison kicking back in her local boozer only to be rudely interrupted by a nuclear explosion and a monstrous aerial contraption piloted by a returning nemesis. So what’s a Duchess Nukem to do but draw her Loverboy revolver, jump aboard a hoverbike armed with “drunken homing plasma missiles”, and zip off to various new locations, including a volcano level.
The aforesaid Cluster Shot lets you perform ricochet kills around corners, while the Roadripper hoverbike seems handy both for running people over and jumping off ramps to reach secrets. New enemies and areas aside, there’s a new harder difficulty setting and an Arrange Mode, which remixes enemy placements in the base game. Here’sthe Steam linkif all that gets your motor running. The press release doesn’t detail whether there will beshitty jokes about gay peoplethis time.
I missed the originalIon Furyso am ill-equipped to agree or disagree with Master Cox about its quality. I’m a touch more, aha, vintage than Matt, so do have some fondness for the gaming era Ion Fury evokes, but I’m also weary of self-mocking 90s-style shooters, so I guess I fall somewhere in the middle here. What do you make of this? Does it belong on our list ofthe best FPS gamesor is it an absolute shambles or some secret third thing?
