Fury

Finally, an MMO where you get to stab people through the neck! Auran, the company that brought you the riveting Trainz series, has created a new online game that mixes the best elements of Guild Wars and Quake into a fast paced, action-packed free-for-all between up to 32 players…or so they claim.

Combat in Fury works like in most other MMOs. Select another player to start whacking them with your weapon, then use hotkeys or buttons to use special moves. Before combat, the player selects the set of skills that they want to use during combat, as well as their equipment. This allows for different skill/equipment sets, or incarnations, to be created for the player to switch between for easy, quick pre-battle configuration.

The special moves also offer a twist. Each skill has one of five elements: air, water, fire, nature, and general. Other than general, skills can either add or subtract charges of the element. Likewise, there are opposing elements (fire and water, air and nature), that cancel each other out when earned. This allows extra flexibility at a price, and motivates the player to keep separate incarnations of element-focused skill sets.

Post-battle, the player is presented with the score screen, which contains a breakdown of performance and how much essence (the equivalent of experience) that each player received. Also, players are given bonus essence for being the most similar to a given archetype (even if that isn’t the archetype of the character), or for achieving certain goals (most kills, etc.). Essence is broken into the four archetypal types (Life, Death, Growth, and Decay), along with a more general Fury essence, and allows for the purchase of new skills and advancement of rank.

Fury’s plot is thin, but decent. The combat itself is rich and rewarding, although players at a much higher level than others are often thrown into the mix and offset the skill level, which is more than just a little annoying, and gets very old very fast. There are hundreds of skills available, and 25 “killing moves”, including one where your character stabs another through the neck, breaks their leg, and backflips them into a wall (!!!).

If Auran can get the balancing issues worked out, I have no doubt that this will be a popular MMO when it comes out of beta, especially now that they’ve announced that you can play for free. In the meantime, I’ll just do my best to stay alive for as long as I can.