Ion Fury

'omg games today are so bad, games arent made like they used to be'
yes they are, and you still didnt buy ion fury.

If you ask me, the recent decade has shown that just because a game developer used to be good and made some well-known games, this doesn't mean that whatever they make now is automatically going to be top shelf. After all, game design marches on, and what used to be good might not have been if it came out now.
And Ion Fury is... eh, it's not mind-blowing, but it's fun, tight, with a lovingly detailed level design, and it's not afraid to do its own thing. There definitely are far superior boomer shooters out there, but if you're a fan of the genre and looking for your next fix, you've found it.
Are you a BAD enough B*TCH?
In many ways Ion Fury is a look back at the 90s gaming culture, but with some things changed up a bit. Shelly aka "the Bombshell" - our protagonist - is a self-described BADDEST B*TCH ON THE FORCE; think Duke Nukem, but with the cringy one-liners toned down just a bit, and female - but not like Lara Croft with overflowing booba and a skimpy outfit. Shelly's look is rather plain; sure, she's wearing a skin-tight police outfit, but she's not here to impress you with her looks, she's here to f*ck sh*t up. Which she does.
Watching her interactions with the main villain is entertaining, and her combat lines definitely feel badass ("Dance, f*cker, dance!" or "We're done when I say we're done."), but the variety is unfortunately kinda low. I could use more of Shelly's f-bombs. And if you're not a fan, you can enable "silent protagonist" and pretend you're playing a buff dude or something. Just stay away from the mirrors.
A girl likes her toys
A good boomer shooter needs a good weapon arsenal, and Ion Fury delivers, even if some weapons feel a little awkward. You might need to go against your instincts here and there, but once you do, I'm sure you'll enjoy the contents of Shelly's bedside drawer.
The Loverboy - your 6-shooter-revolver - has an auto-kill option. You can scan and mark enemies, and Shelly will pop 2 shots in every mark, killing most of them. I found it stupid at first, but this ended up one my favourite ways to kill some enemies. The shotgun has a grenade launcher, but in order to use it, you have to -switch- to the launcher mode, which is cumbersome. You'll also get a lot of ammunition to it, and ever since Half-Life we were trained to consider the side grenade launcher a valuable bailout tool, so using it willy-nilly is something that doesn't come naturally. Here, you absolutely can do that - and killing enemies with explosions grants armour shards, so it's even a good thing.
There's also some other weird pieces. A flaming dual uzi, a cluster bomb hockey puck, bowling bombs (self-explanatory), a crossbow that works nothing like crossbows do in other games (a good thing)... and a motherf*ck*n minigun. Although the ammo to that last one is somewhat sparse, so it's a little situational. Oh, and a police baton, which has some unique uses. No, not that kind of use, although I don't know.
Copaganda, but make it ACAB
Most of the story (such as it is) is told via worldbuilding; you're not expected to treat it seriously, and that's fine. Shelly is described as being proud in keeping the order of PERMANENT MARTIAL LAW for example, and you're clearly supposed to laugh at that - but then you deliver indiscriminate, extrajudicial waste to pretty much everything, soooo... which is it? Eh, it's okay, they're all robots. Fleshy robots. But robots.
And yet, the levels (and even some dialogue) show that eh, maybe the police force ain't all good?... or... at all? It's kinda weird, the way I see it it kinda dances on the line and ends up getting confused in its own message. So just forget about it and shoot the damn robots.
Press A to lower the ladder
The levels are very interconnected in this Dark Souls kinda way. They're also rich in variety, visual funsies and secrets; I worked REALLY hard to find secrets early on, but eventually got frustrated and decided to just pick up the ones that I end up finding somewhat naturally. It worked - I even managed to find one super secret just by following my curiosity - but in the end my final secret tally was merely 44%.
I can't say I ever was starved for resources, though. At first I tried to play on Hard difficulty, but something about it bothered me and I switched to Normal. That perhaps was a little too easy (except some fights, including the final boss. Ugh), but it made me feel powerful, which seems to be what the design is going for. Mission accomplished?
Conclusion
Yeah, it's alright. 17% of players got the achievement for killing the final boss, and otherwise the achievements paint a picture of a dropoff of roughly half of the players every few levels, although if you manage to get to a certain point, you'll likely go all the way. My personal gripe is that it ended up being somewhat easy to get lost later on - the levels get huge - and the pacing sometimes feels a little slow. But I played it over multiple sessions, sometimes a few hours a time, sometimes just 15 mins, and 15 hours later, bam.
My guess is that you'll like this game if you actually lived through the times that this game hearkens back to. And if you can execute the crouch jump without issue. Take that advice for what you will.
There are some boomer shooters on my curator page

I liked the gunplay. movement and some other aspects, but it was not enough to keep me playing another boomer shooter.

There is nothing too special about Ion Fury, except, that it's pretty flawless in every important aspect for an oldschool shooter.
There are secrets to find, good weapons and gunplay, good enemy and level desing and all of this on ~94mb.
But I just can't play games anymore, were I have to find the yellow, red or blue keycard to advance, without any hints, how to progress. I'm not saying that the "puzzles" are hard, but they just interrupted the gameflow too much. But yeah, this was already a thing in the 90s, so if you don't mind that, go for it.
If you search for something like e.g. duke nukem 3d or want more of it, this is probably it.
7/10

You like Duke Nukem? This is the same but only with a female as leadrole. Even their defence force is similar, in Duke we had EDF and here it GDF. So yeah, this game belongs in the Duke universe! And these maps and sometimes puzzles are top!

This is a really fun game, but oh god why the hell haven't you fixed the stupid shotgun/DLC bug that leaves it inaccessible throughout the main campaign yet?! It's stupid that the bug still haven't been fixed, years after its introduction, and even various workarounds the player can try (e.g. console vars, restarting the chapter, etc) are unable to fix it for some of us. This means we are forced to play through the whole main campaign with a reduced arsenal, which also means some more ammo conservation needs to be taken into account at times.
I was almost of the mind to not recommend the game due to that stupid bug, but yes, the game is still quite fun. It would've just been even more awesome if I was allowed to use the stupid shotgun too, guys...

its a great shooter with some bitchin music, but i felt like some of the levels drag on too much

Ion Fury was brilliant.
It's a game built with the "Build Engine" (or an updated version of it). This means it's crunchy, low poly, and very very old school. Big Sprites mix it up with big polygons. This game is crazy old school, and I love it for it!
While everyone's going on about how amazing Doom and Quake are, there was another game at the time that was capturing the 'fun' niche of the FPS genre, Duke Nukem 3D. Born of a lineage of Shareware 3d platformers, Duke 3D was the culmination of a lot of work done by Ken Silverman to create his "Build" engine, a rival to the Doom engine, but with more capabilities. While Doom and Quake were firmly serious, Duke had its tongue wedged into its cheek with a smart-talking irreverant hero with a 50-a-day voice and devil-may-care attitude.
It took years for a proper sequel to Duke Nukem3d to come out, and when it did, Duke Nukem Forever was a huge disappointment. It simply didn't live up to the original, and left everyone wanting something, anything to take the crown from Duke and bring it into the 21st century.
in the 2020's two games have done just that, Ion Fury and Turbo Overkill. The original Publisher 3D Realms had some serious financial difficulty and was sold off. Meanwhile the older "Apogee Software" that started 3D Realms continued its own path under different people...
This game uses the Build Engine which went with 3D Realms along with Duke Nukem, while the second is made by Apogee, the descendant of the original Apogee that started 3D Realms.. Both do an absolutely brilliant job of being the "successor" to Duke Nukem 3D. That both games are made by a really small team, and yet have massive levels, intricate designs, loads of secrets and brilliant music, voices and weapons is no small feat. In terms of pure enjoyment, both games can stand toe-to-toe with more modern games.
It's nice to see 3D Realms finally produce a great game with the Build Engine. I think their DNF game so tainted the "Duke Nukem" brand, they really did need to do some new IP. But if you swapped in Jon St. John this would squarely be a Duke Nukem game.
While Turbo Overkill uses a "proper" 3d engine, Ion Fury (or Ion Maiden, its original working title), uses a 2.5D engine that simulates 3D using visual tricks. This means that looking up and down is capped at about 60 degrees. Any more, and things would warp horribly. Like Rise of the Triad, Ion Fury did give me some motion sickness because of this 2 1/2 D view....
All Build Engine games feature tricks and secrets thanks to hidden panels, pass-through 'phantom' walls, hidden lifts, hidden buttons and traversable ledges you can jump to. In the original Duke Nukem, the secrets numbered in the 5-10 range per level (if I remember correctly). Ion Fury takes it to a whole other level with over 30 secrets in each level. With that many, you'd think it'd be obvious where they are. But unless you go looking for them, it's easy to miss all but a small handful. Some are hidden behind paintings which are identical to the rest. Others are through phantom walls, or destructible scenery. Some you need to use quicksave and quickload to savescum because the jumps to get to the secret are almost impossible to get right first time.
All of this adds up to a REALLY challenging game, especially for gamers looking for that nostalgic hit. This game really rewards exploration and wall-humping, just like the OG 3d games like Wolfenstein3D and Doom did.
The music is brilliant, setting the scene really well, and the VoiceOvers are pretty good (although a little theatrical compared to other games). The expletives can be very cringey sometimes, and the bad guy really hams it up. But it all melts together into a game that, like Duke, has its tongue firmly wedged in its cheek.
Sprinkled throughout the game are little nods to old movies and old games. Little bits that look like Wolfensten flash by as you go down a lift. A secret room features a scene from a 1970's SciFi film 'barbarella'. There's a little secret area that's relatively easy to get to if you do some jumping, and it'll reward you with some Portal-related fun. And there's so much more!
The developer really pulled all the stops out when making this game. It's absolutely PIN sharp and rock solid. Level design is beyond brilliant.
I'm in awe of what was achieved with this game. It's well worth the £15 or so I got it for. Given that I didn't get 100% and yet I still played for 25 hours, there's easily £30 or more worth of entertainment in this, which puts it in line with many other AA games out there right now.
I had an absolute BLAST with Ion Fury, and (provided you don't mind a bit of bad language) you will too.