YMMV / Ion Fury

• Awesome Music: Jarkko Roetsen has put together a fantastic synthwave soundtrack for the game. Standout examples are Genesize, Broken System, Natural Selektor, Quadrature and Corroded Beats.
• Demonic Spiders: Greater Priests. Their only weakness is that they usually try to alt-fire with their ion bows, telegraphing their attack and letting you find cover easily, but their arrows hurt a lot and that alt-fire shoots in a wide spread that makes sidestepping difficult. Oh, and every now and then they'll One-Hit Kill you with a headshot before you even know they're there. Aftershock adds Greater Greats, white robed versions who fire fast charging plasma bolts that can kill you quickly if you're not paying attention.
  • Later levels introduce Decons, flying enemies with salvo rocket launchers. They have twice the health as a Bony Whoop so you need two double-taps to take them down, which means if there's more than one (and there's always at least two) you'll be reloading in the meantime. That'll give the survivors of your first attack plenty of time to unleash a long volley of missiles at you, which do a lot of damage and have a large splash radius to boot. The game is fond of putting Deacons around tight hallway corners as well.
  • 'Aftershock gives us Lavapedes, Diopede variants, except they spew out lava and are far more aggressive. Their lava spew can quickly tank your health and they love to ambush you from lava, and leave lava pools when they die.
• Disappointing Last Level: The last few levels are fairly bland caverns and industrial corridors with the same bosses recycled from earlier in the game several times.
• Goddamned Bats: Mechasects. They're too small and move too fast for you to hit reliably with most guns, and their attacks avoid your armor and strip away your HP directly. They'd be literal and figurative Demonic Spiders if it not for their exclusive melee attack, at which range your baton kills them in one hit. They also have pitiful health, so the revolver's autoaiming secondary makes short work of them. And of course if you roll a bowling mine at them you'll clear the whole lot.
  • The flying Bony Whoops also have a very small hitbox, and their flight patterns are erratic so they're quite difficult to hit. Their gun also doesn't deal a lot of damage, but they have a tendency to shoot at you before you can see them, so you can find yourself hunting them for a while as they take grind down your health. Fortunately enough, the revolver's secondary works wonders against them as well, usually killing them in a single double-tap.
• Nightmare Fuel: Shelly's mugshot as she takes damage, which goes from looking normal and healthy, to bleeding from her head with blood running down on her face, and similarly to Doomguy, her face can be mutilated or have her head blown off on her mugshot depending on how she dies. It's pretty jarring considering how lighthearted the game is even compared to Doom and Duke Nukem.
  • There’s also the little matter of the game fading to black and throwing a big bloody “YOU DIED” on the screen (and there is a passing resemblance to the earlier Resident Evil games) if you wait a few moments before you restart the level.
  • Despite having a similar tongue-in-cheek tone, Shelly's world is much much darker than Duke Nukem's. The situation of the world is in is often played as Black Comedy, but even then the game does not gloss the fact a Mad Scientist-slash-Cult leader has taken over a city violently, turning it into a ghost town, and the that most of the enemies you fight were once normal people who have been experimented upon. Oh, and he gets away from justice because the GDF was also funding him in secret, resulting in her getting in trouble with them. Then proceeds to try to erupt a volcano.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Otherwise considered a solid Spiritual Successor to older Build Shooter FPS games like Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, and the original Shadow Warrior, Ion Fury is best known among the general public for two things:
  1. The band Iron Maiden suing the renamed game due to its former title of Ion Maiden. On the surface, it's a perfectly logical lawsuit, because of the extreme similarity of their names, and even if they'd argued solely on that point they probably still would have won. However, several of the other claims put forward by Iron Maiden's lawyers dipped into Frivolous Lawsuit territory — among other things, they claimed that the protagonist is a gender-swap of Iron Maiden's leader Steve Harris (she was originally conceived as a Distaff Counterpart to Duke Nukem), that the skull bomb logo resembles Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie (the logo is much less detailed than Eddie, certainly not enough to be a ripoff), and that the gameplay is a copy of their Legacy of the Beast mobile game (Legacy of the Beast is a role-playing game, not an FPS). Even fans of the game are not willing to let this lawsuit go, mostly due to the absurdity of it and to just make fun of Iron Maiden and their lawyers.
  2. The use of homophobic humor. With the reveal that the game had some rather insulting content towards LGBTI+ groups (specifically, a sprite of depicting Olay soap as Ogay brand soap, and actual gay slurs hidden away as an Easter Egg), the developers responded by quickly patching out the offending bits from the game and releasing a statement declaring that such "jokes" had no place in this game or games published by 3D Realms going forward. This, naturally, didn't sit well with those who found the jokes inoffensive, calling the removal of the content censorship. The fact that 3D Realms decided to reinforce how wrong they saw the original content as by donating ten grand to a suicide prevention group added some anger to the response. That a lead developer for the game was caught saying anti-transgender comments on Discord at the same time certainly added to the controversy. The controversy was magnified when the game was review-bombed on Steam by anti-censorship players who had logged very little playing time, pressuring the developers into reversing their decision and restoring the offensive content, which in turn drew criticism from those who thought removing the homophobic humor was the right thing to do, and that if 3D Realms considered the homophobic humor an Old Shame and removed it of their own choice, then it isn't censorship but editing.
• Porting Disaster: The console versions are ported by a third party and are noted for their inferior performance compared to the PC original. The Nintendo Switch version in particular has trouble maintaining a consistent frame rate and frequently lags with multiple enemies on screen, even with the Konami Code to unlock 60 FPS mode. Furthermore, as of 2024 the Aftershock expansion and latest updates have yet to appear on consoles.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • As 3D Realms no longer owns the IP, this game is basically a direct sequel to Duke Nukem 3D in everything but name.
  • The upcoming sequel, Phantom Fury, owes a lot from the early (cancelled) first prototype of Duke Nukem Forever.
  • The upcoming distant prequel to the game, Tempest Rising, sets it up as basically Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn in all but name.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Or rather, prequel. General consensus is that it is a very good throwback to old Build Engine games, particularly the Duke Nukem games, without a lot of the same flaws as Shelly's first outing.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Courtesy of Vocal Minority, a few considered Shelly's sexualized '90s character designs better (NSFW). Which is Hilarious in Hindsight in relation to Duke Nukem Forever, where the game was heavily criticized for sexualizing almost all the girls and being downright misogynistic at times.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Whilst many fans are happy just to have another first-person shooter of its kind, most have also expressed disappointment to how closely it follows its inspiration game without doing anything different or unique.
• Unexpected Character: John R. Blade from SiN appears at the end of the trailer for Phantom Fury as an acquaintance of Shelly's, his first appearance in a game since 2006, and suggests that both exist in the same setting.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The fact that the developers have managed to create maps that look fantastic even by modern standards using a 20-and-something year old engine is nothing short of commendable.