EIEIO 2007: Hands-on with Fury; this game is HOT

"Waste enemies, not time" is the game's tagline, and that's exactly what you'll be doing. Unless you're a n00b, in which case you'll be the one getting wasted. Rather than pound away on helpless boars for days on end, developer Auran has opted to immediately thrust you into vicious and exciting PvP arenas. By killing players, unlocking achievements (most kills, longest survivor, etc.), and just generally being a PvP badass, you'll gain essence which will let you unlock new and more powerful skills.

There are "quests," but these simply require you to turn in a certain amount of essence in order to gain new skills. So, the better you do the faster you will move up in the world, but even complete failures will slowly but surely gain enough essence to better equip themselves with the more than 400 possible abilities.

You can have two dozen abilities active during a match, which gives you quite a lot of options. Perhaps you will have mostly buffs and just one or two melee / projectile attacks, or maybe you will bring a specific skill for each type of enemy you will encounter. It's completely up to you, just like in Guild Wars. Unlike Guild Wars however, there are no classes. You are free to create whatever type of character you wish, and if that's getting boring or just not working out for you, then change it up all you want.

Customization is the key to Fury's character system, and it encourages you to go nuckin futs. Hopefully players will create all kinds of combinations, but eventually the tried-and-true setups will most likely make up the majority of character builds. Zzzzz, bor-ing!

The arenas are heavily varied and packed with danger zones (such as bottomless pits, which become very much a part of gameplay), as well as power-ups. This is where the game really starts to feel like Unreal or Quake multiplayer. You can find health, armor, magic, and even damage multipliers, so knowing the arenas in and out will certainly work to your advantage. The game also has four elements, one of which is tied to every skill. Players who excel in a certain element will be weak to its counterpart and vice versa. This helps add a much-needed layer of complexity when battling players who are equal to or above your level. Find their weakness and use the elements to turn the battle in your favor.

There are four gameplay types which any FPS fan will be familiar with, including a team elimination and a unique spin on capture the flag. The mode I spent my time on was Bloodbath, which is a free-for-all mode for up to 32 players. This lets you find out who is truly the best. I was told my character build was more of a paladin-type, which I assumed meant I was good at healing and tanking, but not so much with the damage and raping of skulls. Luckily, while everyone else was figuring out how to jump, I started dropping bodies. 

Actually, I paid very little attention to my buffs and simply spammed my main melee move (there is no auto-attack). Whenever I built up enough blue energy and was getting ganged up on, I would hit my AOE shock wave skill (which gains damage depending on how much elemental energy you have stored) which helped throw some digits onto the kill count. My opposition sucked, to be blunt, but in the face of more skilled adversaries I would expect you to need to use more than just a few abilities to do so well.

A couple of things I noticed are that when you are getting hit by projectile attacks, it's pretty much impossible to get away. Unless your pursuer gets distracted, you're going to have to turn around and fight. Perhaps there's a skill to change that around...

Secondly, in free-for-all, you can find two enemies battling it out and simply snipe them from afar, or just wait until one dies and then swoop in to pick off the other one. On the flipside, if you're getting raped by a scantily-clad Paladin, you can try and team up temporarily to bring their reign of sexy terror to an end.

Finally, on my second match I decided to test out the other nuances of the game, like emotes, power-ups, hidden areas, etc. I didn't want to fight anyone but ended up running through a three-way battle. I jumped in the middle and wiped them out with an AOE, then collected their "blood tokens" and went to the far side of the arena to /dance and /kata. Well, little did I know but those blood tokes slowly add to your point total, and since dying depletes your score by 10%, I ended up winning the match simply by blowing kisses to myself. It seems on some of the bigger matches players may try to do this on purpose, but luckily they show up on the map so it won't be too much of a problem.

After the match, you get to see how well you did, your achievements, and your essence collected. You also unlock treasure by playing in arenas, which is how you gain new weapons and equipment. It's interesting to see how they've taken all the clichés of RPG's and wrapped it up into a fast-paced skill-based multiplayer game. Big ups to my main men and women at Auran, re-spek! 

What? Where am I? Oh yeah... so all in all it was a very intense experience, and if anyone has ever hopped into Warsong Gulch in World of Warcraft, they should have a mild inkling of what every 15 minutes is like in Fury. I highly recommend you at least try this game when the trial is released, or why not hop on the beta right now?

Fury is scheduled for release on October 9th for PC.