Full Metal Furies

One of the criticisms that were most addressed to Castle Crashers, which shares a lot in common with Full Metal Furies, was based on the excessive repetitiveness of the actions and situations that, although they did not undermine the fun offered, represented a small limit of a great game. Full Metal Furies manages to solve this problem by creating a truly rare variety of situations and combinations of the character. Sure, it's far from the completely customizable direction of the character undertaken by the guys of Studio Evil with Super Cane Magic Zero, but it creates variety by guaranteeing, in full RPG style, a series of skills and power ups that completely change the game. But let's go in order.

There is not much to say about history, which is well written and full of humor. In such a game it is easy to consider it more than anything else an excuse to give blows to blows ... and in Full Metal Furies there are very many blows. Designed to be faced in a cooperative mode (even in single player we will have to switch between two characters drawn among the four available in a more general sense), it certainly gives its best when it is possible to face the levels in the company of all four characters, controlled by four friends (the cooperative is available both offline and online, although online it is limited to its friends list, no matchmaking with strangers!).

The diversity of the four different characters is the real fulcrum of the game experience: there is a sniper capable of leaving mines and escaping attacks with a very useful grappling hook, a gunslinger with a very high rate of fire, a fighter who hammer forward destroying everything and a soldier armed with a shield (real salvation of the team in the worst situations).

Contrary to what happens in many games of the genre, in Full Metal Furies everyone is extremely important and although they are not all lethal in the same way, the progression of the characters and the usefulness of each are perfectly balanced creating a situation in which we find ourselves really good with everyone. The experience will be determined by the actual use of the attacks: the more we use the special action of the character, the more lethal, or useful, or faster, depending on the equipment and the character. So each player will be able to take advantage of a simple attack, a dodge and two special moves, controllable with the four buttons X, Y, A, B of the pad (highly recommended), and empower those who actually use the most.

All this is accompanied by the evolution of their characters, who can buy different types of upgrades through the game's currency, from special attributes and power ups to simple increases in the life bar or their strength. The system, all in all simple, works extremely well because of the huge choice among all very useful alternatives which guarantees strong variety in the way of facing the game and managing the characters. By trying Full Metal Furies with a group of friends, I could see how different people developed the same character completely differently making it lethal in practically opposite ways.

Just to give an example, the fighter can become a pure war machine that maximizes the damage of his hammer and resists the damage suffered, but he can also become extremely technical using the jump and a kind of parry that, with the right timing, makes the practically invulnerable fighter. If you imagine that each character can evolve into several different approaches, all equally lethal, you realize that it is exactly the mechanical one capable of making Full Metal Furies a really interesting and well-made game.

Add to that a variety of huge game situations. It is easy, in games like this, to tend to re-propose levels that have in some way similar structures. Here, however, as you progress, you will always find not only different and increasingly lethal and complicated enemies to face by making the most of the skills of your characters, but also a very variable level design. We move from normal levels with horizontal scrolling to arenas of pure survival to even places that recall, both in name and in situations, the descent into the infernal circles. All this contributes to giving freshness to a formula that never tires, even after hours spent playing. Probably due to the cooperative nature of the game, aimed at having fun with friends.

Full Metal Furies is, on all fronts, a true cooperative game and it never ceases to remind those who are playing. It is completely unthinkable, especially going forward in the game, to try to face entire arenas or situations alone or leaving your teammates on the ground, both because teamwork becomes essential on several occasions (the character with the shield can protect the sniper from special attacks others, for example), both because the enemies often have shields that can only be destroyed by one of the team characters, who will therefore have to move compactly to advance in increasingly chaotic and crazy levels.

Just about this, although the game is technically excellent and very light, the graphic choice and the exaggerated number of enemies on the screen lead, sometimes, to even lose sight of your character and this makes you think about the possibility of finding some alternative to bring out the protagonists within the general chaos of many arenas. It becomes a problem when, sometimes not too rare, you die because you actually don't realize what is happening anymore. Especially because the difficulty curve really grows, albeit never too suddenly and after a few hours it will be normal to try the same levels several times looking for the best strategies.

MODUS OPERANDI
I played Full Metal Furies on PC (and in the editorial office we also quickly tested the Xbox One version) through codes obtained directly from the development team. I tried all the game modes for about 10 hours, thoroughly examining the cooperative mode and reaching an overall completion rate of 60% (the whole game has a longevity of 15-20 hours). The game ran on a PC equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 1700, 16 GB of RAM, a SAMSUNG 960 NVMe SSD and a GeForce GTX 1080, and I used a 21 "Samsung SyncMaster 2243 monitor.