The Cambridge Geek

Full Metal Furies

The Girl and I both like to game, but we struggle to find things that we enjoy playing together. She's a fan of beat-em-ups, while I am not, and I'm a fan of RPGs, which she is not. As such, when we come across something we can play co-operatively, it gets played rather heavily.

That's what we've done with Civ, Trine, Magicka and others, and it's what we're doing with Full Metal Furies.

This action RPG brawler can support up to four players playing different roles, those being Fighter, Tank, Sniper and Engineer, all of which will be familiar to people who've played similar things before. The Tank is powerful but slow, the Fighter has a wide range of offensive moves, the Engineer controls the field with gadgets and the Sniper is a git.

We've settled pretty heavily with her playing Fighter and me as Tank. I enjoy smacking people in the face with a shield.

You can only murder people with shields colour coded to match you.

The game has a comical tone throughout, with short dialogue pieces between fights keeping everything light-hearted and providing a fun little plot to drive the story along. Each of the characters has a distinctive "voice" and the cutscenes are always a delight, with impressively stupid villains.

(I'm gonna hit him in the face.)

The action is primarily battling, with enemies attacking with melee, ranged weapons, bombs, air strikes, mines and light jazz. It's frenetic, with death coming easily and the possibility of taking on things too high level for you. In those situations, you may find yourself grinding away until you defeat it. We spent an upsettingly long time trying to murder one particular boss.

However, the fights are enjoyable, and the checkpoints are very friendly, dropping you more or less in front of wherever you died, such that it's easy to get stuck in a loop of "just one more go". Thus far that's got us past everything eventually, although the fight against the first Titan nearly had us reaching for "story" (read "easy") mode. We resisted, and feel better for it.

The fight mechanics incorporate a relatively simple strike and riposte system, that puts the emphasis on watching your opponent's moves and anticipating their actions based on behavioural cues. That's mostly obvious, but occasionally the screen can get sufficiently busy that it's possible to lose track of where you are, how close to death you are and whether you're accidentally punching your compatriot in the face. This can lead to some unexpected deaths, but the revive system allows you to bring your ally back from the dead, as long as you can survive a doubled onslaught.

The other aspect to the game is the various side levels. These mostly skip the fights, but instead put you through certain challenges, such as dodging cannon fire, prevents explosions or running. Just running. While avoiding gunfire.

Note the Girl dying horribly in slow motion.

And sometimes, avoiding artillery. And mines.

Note me being blown off a mine, onto another mine.

We're nowhere near finished it yet, either the main storyline or finding all of the secrets, but we're certainly in it until the bitter end. Excellent for gaming couples.

Highly recommended.

Tagged: Game Action RPG 2.5D Hard difficulty PC Local multiplayer