Are you ready to unleash fury on your enemies in the form of bullets, grenades, melee strikes, head stomps, and superpowers? Well then Fury Unleashed has you covered! The game has just come out of its Early Access status with a full release on consoles and PC. Described by developers Awesome Games Studio as an inspiration from modern roguelite platformers and classic platformer shooters, Fury Unleashed carves its own path with its art style, level design, and storytelling.

You controls Fury, the fictional creation of a comic book author who’s seeing a sharp decline in popularity. As Fury, you’re tasked with taking out enemies from an ancient jungle setting, a Nazi stronghold, an alien base, and the not-yet created bowels of the author’s imagination. As far as difficulty goes, the game has “Hard” as the default setting. Luckily, “Easy” is an option as well for those struggling with the aggressive enemies and bullet dodging. Co-op is another option to ease the burden and enjoy the gameplay with a friend or loved one.

Similar to current rogues such as Dead Cells and Rogue Legacy, the map is randomly generated each time. While the player loses any equipment or power-ups upon death, using experience points can permanently upgrade Fury for future runs. These upgrades consist of the typical ones such as higher starting health, higher critical chance rate, and increased grenade inventory. It also consists of less typical upgrades such as stacking protective shields every time you gain a combo of five. The only bummer is that the skill tree expands quickly and then kind of stops. In other words, it doesn’t feel like there is a lot of growth from mid-level to high-level.

Another way that Fury Unleashed separates itself from the competition is the combo meter. When you attack an enemy, the combo meter engages, with killing enemies extending the combo meter. When taking damage, either from an enemy or an environmental hazard, the combo meter resets. Taking too much time to engage an enemy will also reset the combo meter. The idea is to string long combos together by killing enemies throughout the map while bolstering your offensive and defensive abilities. Of course, this becomes harder to do as the enemies become tougher the further along you go in the game.

The aspects that I found the most original were the storytelling and the implementation of the comic book style with the level design. Without spoiling too much, the story creatively humanizes the real-life effects that extreme negative criticism can have on content creators. People who have put their heart and soul into a passion project can spiral down into a dark place by consumers who may not realize how harmful their words really are. And with all the gameplay taking place inside of individual comic book panels, the display of emails, texts, and letters help provide some visual variety.

On that note, the comic book level design executes itself perfectly. Just like reading a comic book, starting at the top left corner, the final goal is the bottom right panel. How you get there is up to you, whether it’s down and right, right and down, or anything in between. Fast travel is also an option for previously explored areas, cutting down on unnecessary backtracking and preventing combo breaks. To summarize, all these mechanics are wonderful in design and perfectly implement themselves throughout the entire course of the game.

Even after playing through plenty of rogues, Fury Unleashed stands out. With its bright and varied visuals, unique combination of level design and storytelling, and polished modernized mechanics, this one will keep you coming back for more. So grab a partner or go it alone, and unleash some fury!

Final Score: 8.5 out of 10

GotGame is on OpenCritic, check out our reviews here.