You have no shortage of choice in Metroidvanias at all levels of quality, so it takes a lot for me to really take to one. Guns of Fury came out of nowhere this year and exceeded all those standards with panache. At the core, Guns of Fury is a metroidvania where you essentially play as a Metal Slug protagonist. If you remember The Mummy Demastered, Wayforward's perfectly average but perfectly enjoyable Metroid game where you played as a Contra protagonist, you should be familiar with the sort of ground that could be tread here. You play Vincent Fury, a lone wolf soldier hunting for a captured scientist and battling an evil corporation. The story is perfectly cheesy, and the game itself doubly so. You scrounge through enemy terrain unearthing a wide array of guns and explosives with various stats and properties, and you have ample excuse to use them. It is this love of Metal Slug-style carnage that makes the game work. Where it lacks in Metal Slug's arcade elegance, it emulates the chaos of a good Metal Slug level in the actual traversal. Whereas in an IGAvania style game you might be just running through rooms bored, damage tanking to get through, in Guns of Fury several rooms are just massive playgrounds where almost every round you fire destroys SOME piece of scenery, and in the less action-packed rooms, you are still contending with popcorn grunts that survive just long enough to make you think about their shot patterns, but not long enough to force you into a game of red-light green-light, and the money they drop always gets you meaningfully closer to SOME upgrade or new toy, and their ammo drops meaningfully keep you stocked in subweapons, so you never feel too squeezed about using them. There is an art to this that very few Metroidvanias successfully manage to pull off, and Guns of Fury joins a very small elite number of metroidvanias that make that part of the game work.
It is not merely the traversal that makes the game good. The pixel art is phenomenal, the stages varied and full of personality in art and design in equal measure, the soundtrack from Dominic Ninimark of Gravity Circuit game is top notch. Guns of Fury is also certain you have played these sorts of games before and does not waste your time. It expects you know what a double jump is and they can just start throwing tougher jumps at you. The map is loaded with collectibles, and you will surely exhaust the pin system on the map trying to track all the leads you have to pass up on. In multiple cases you will come back to a secret, break it with your new toy, get an upgrade, and just behind it is ANOTHER secret needing another unlock (Yes, that obnoxious bathroom secret is going to stay a secret basically all game despite taunting you from the 30% mark.). After a certain point the game opens up, allowing you to tackle two or three stages in varying orders depending, most likely, on which one you find first. It has been a long time since I have played a game that was happy to let me get lost and explore.
The bosses are quite good as well, an array of dastardly mechs and villainous super soldiers. Several have a one or two silly patterns that could never threaten you, but on average they are quite a lot of fun, and one area in which this game eviscerates The Mummy Demastered.
Guns of Fury is a sophisticated, interesting metroidvania from someone who deeply understands the craft, and is one of the finest and most interesting examples of the genre I have played in recent memory. That such talent came essentially out of nowhere just a few months ago serves as a reminder that however dire gaming might seem now, there is still greatness to be found.
