Machine Gun Fury

In the arcades, Ikari Warriors was more than just another overhead shoot ‘em up, it was a true masterpiece that changed the way run ‘n gun action games were controlled. Instead of simply shooting in one or two directions, players could rotate the eight-way joystick in a circle, allowing our hero to attack enemies coming from all directions. Unfortunately, when Ikari Warriors was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System, it came with downgraded graphics, poor sound and revised gameplay that ditched the eight-way controller. For longtime fans of the arcade game, the home console version was a big disappointment. I bring this up because the new run ‘n gun shooter, Machine Gun Fury, desperately wants to be like the arcade version of Ikari Warriors. Too bad it’s a lot more like the crappy home console port in more ways than one. Here is my review of Machine Gun Fury.

Right from the opening cinema, you know exactly what kind of game this is going to be. When Madam-G threatens to overthrow the world governments and kill all non-believers, it’s up to Gunner Jimbo to cut short his vacation in order to join Suzi Uzi and Mini-Gun Floyd in a battle through eight stages full of running, gunning and shooting action. In other words, it’s a Rambo game without the Sylvester Stallone license.

There’s a simple throughline that sees our heroes infiltrating a jungle camp in order to destroy a stockpile of weapons and locate Madam-G’s secret baes. Either all the way through in one go (in arcade mode) or level by level (in standard mode), the three action stars will be asked to take on a small army of bad guys in a lot of recognizable locations.

The one thing I like about the game is how it isn’t afraid to mix things up from one level to the next. Machine Gun Fury lulls you into thinking that it’s going to be an overhead shooter, similar to Ikari Warriors and Commando. However, it won’t take long for the game to shift the perspective to a side-scroller, not unlike Contra or Gunstar Heroes. Other stages will see us racing down the harbor in a speeder boat. The game will eventually shift back to the traditional overhead action, but even that is changed up with the addition of exploring a massive base in order to find keycards and other items.

All of this shows that the developers were constantly trying to find ways to keep the action fresh and evolving. And that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, based on the game I played, very little thought went into making sure that all of these different changes were actually fun.

Take the side-scrolling levels as an example. On paper, shifting perspectives sounds like a great way to shake things up, but these platforming bits are undermined by the gameplay. Instead of taking the time to adjust the controls according to where the camera is positioned, this game just keeps everything the same, no matter what. As you can imagine, this makes running and jumping in the side-scrolling sections a lot more frustrating than it should be, leading to a lot of cheat deaths.

It doesn’t help that the longer stages lack any form of checkpointing. To be fair to Machine Gun Fury, this isn’t a problem for most of this game. There’s no need for a checkpoint when a stage only lasts a few minutes. However, there are a couple levels towards the end that are substantially longer. I already mentioned the stage that has you collecting keycards and exploring the base. This is a game that likes to have enemies ambush our heroes at the worst possible times, which means that if you die towards the end of one of these longer levels, you’ll need to spend another ten or fifteen minutes collecting all those items again. That’s no fun.

And that brings us to the game’s biggest issue – it’s way too hard to aim your gun. Instead of finding a way to give us multi-directional shooting, Machine Gun Fury only shoots the direction you’re running. That’s great if an enemy is right in front of you, but most of the time the soldiers will sneak up behind you or flank our heroes on either side. I found it incredibly hard to accurately aim my shots, especially when on the move. This is one of those times when it would have made more sense to use a dual-stick approach, even if they limit the shots to only eight directions.

It doesn’t help that the game is also incredibly short, with no real hooks to get you to want to play it more than once. I suppose this is offset a bit by the budget-friendly six-dollar asking price, but even that feels a bit steep for what you’re getting. It’s bad enough that Machine Gun Fury doesn’t add anything new to the run ‘n gun genre, but it doesn’t even do a good job of recreating the action games it’s trying to emulate. Machine Gun Fury is a hard game to recommend.