Developer: Tim Wheatley
Publisher: Tim Wheatley
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Blue Fury – Review
Perspective is everything. We live in an era where a blockbuster like Masters of the Universe is a box office bomb and a movie born from an internet creepypasta, The Backrooms, becomes a runaway indie hit. This trend hasn’t quite taken over the gaming industry yet… and with GTA VI on the horizon, the Goliaths aren’t going anywhere soon. Still, beneath the shadow of the AAA titans, hundreds of solo projects launch every month, hoping to be that lightning-in-a-bottle game equivalent of The Backrooms. The unfortunate truth is that most of these are destined to fly under the radar regardless of their quality. So, we figured it was time to give one of them the spotlight. Enter Blue Fury, the debut title from solo developer Tim Wheatley.
Story
As the pilot of Blue Fury, you’ll undertake a series of military operations across enemy territory. Short text blurbs accompany each mission. These add context and indirectly tell you what you’re supposed to do, but they never go into full detail. An opposing nation isn’t even named, but simply referred to as “a small country that isn’t as good as ours”, for example. The devil is in the details, and worldbuilding or lore is perhaps the one area where Blue Fury could’ve been noticeably improved without compromising the game’s overall feeling of authenticity.
Graphics
Authenticity, rather than visual splendor, takes priority here. The game looks like it was pulled directly from the ‘90s, with its blocky, 16-bit models, including a bright blue helicopter and simple environments where “different biome” means as much as “palette swap”. While the graphics aren’t going to impress anyone, there is an undeniable charm to the basic simplicity of Blue Fury’s visuals. The only small gripe we have about the game’s aesthetics is how basic its UI and menus look. Even a different (retro) font choice would’ve made a huge difference, if only to make things feel even more authentic. It goes without saying that performance is a non-issue here, although there are rough edges elsewhere.
Sound
Audio takes a minimalist approach, favoring the stark atmosphere of the battlefield over a bombastic soundtrack. The soundscape is dominated by the industrial whir of your helicopter’s rotors and the satisfying, arcade-like crunch of successful weapon impacts. While a more robust, retro-inspired synth track might have elevated the energy of the campaign, the sparse sound design instead highlights the isolation of being stuck behind enemy lines, reinforcing the game’s uncompromising, old-school difficulty.
Gameplay
While we’re absolutely going to take a look at Blue Fury on its own merit, we can’t discuss the gameplay without first talking about how the game came to be. By definition, Blue Fury is a 3D shoot-‘em-up game where you pilot an attack helicopter. More than that, it is a passion project designed as a love letter to a bygone era of gaming, particularly 1994’s Zeewolf. Wheatley created the game over six months, and the development itself was a learning process. By his own admission, Blue Fury isn’t a perfect game, and he would’ve done things differently now if he had to start over. Even so, it’s a near pitch-perfect recreation of early ‘90s gaming, and we were surprised to see just how much Wheatley was able to pack into Blue Fury. One thing that stood out to us was that the map is procedurally generated, so although your objectives remain the same across mission attempts, no two runs will play out exactly the same.
Speaking of missions, the main campaign comprises 30 of them, where you take control of the titular helicopter. Controls are simple to understand: moving your helicopter uses the standard WASD layout, and you have dedicated buttons to move up and down as well. The helicopter is equipped with both a mini-gun and missiles. As these are unguided, aiming needs to be done manually, with your trusty mouse. As straightforward as piloting Blue Fury is, the missions you take on are anything but easy. As tempting as it would be to simply go in guns blazing, it’s important to stick to your objectives, as you simply do not have the firepower to annihilate everything in sight. Instead, you’ll need to focus on destroying specific enemies or rescuing friendly soldiers who have become stranded behind enemy lines. You’ll need to keep an eye on both your fuel gauge and how much ammo you have left too. To make matters worse, each mission has a strict time limit, in the form of a missile launch countdown timer. If that timer hits zero, an enemy missile launches and spells game over for you. Supplementing the main campaign is a quick-play mode with randomised settings. You can tweak these to a certain degree so that you can tailor your mission to your liking, then jump straight into the action.
If there’s one thing we can fault here, it’s that the game is tailored to an audience that is already familiar with this kind of game. Onboarding is non-existent: there is no in-game tutorial, and you need to go into a menu to see the controls. As a quick aside: we weren’t able to back out of this menu and had to force close and reboot the game, but rough edges like that were something that we were expecting. That does bring us back to Blue Fury’s raison d’être. By any definition, this is a niche release, but it was never intended to cater to a mainstream audience in the first place. Instead, Blue Fury lets those players who share Wheatley’s passion for this very specific kind of game indulge in what they know and love. For a mere €10.25, that’s already more than we could’ve hoped to ask for.
Conclusion
Perspective is everything. Blue Fury isn’t a perfect game. But that is okay, because those rough edges never undermine what the game sets out to achieve. Wheatley knew exactly what kind of game he wanted Blue Fury to be, and he delivered. While he may be looking back at it thinking of what he would have done differently, we’re looking at a charming, if imperfect, game that effortlessly succeeds in scratching a very specific itch.
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