Phantom Fury review: a retro shooter obsessed with inconsequential do-hickeys

No arm in trying

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/3D Realms

• Developer: Slipgate Ironworks
• Publisher: 3D Realms
• Release: April 23rd
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: £20/$25/€25
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

Hurtling along on top of a train full of goons in Phantom Fury you will see another rushing train pulling up at matching speed, inviting you to hop from one to the other. A helicopter will soon join the fray. Many things will soon explode, and you will take a short break from the minigunning to calmly physics some boxes into a set of steps with a crane. This FPS is not so much writing a love letter to a bygone era of noughties shooters, as it is standing underneath the window of its respected elders earnestly serenading them with a busted old keytar from the attic. There are bum notes and the singing voice is not exactly boy-band beautiful, but the love is unmistakably there. And, hey, singing is hard.

This is a sorta-sequel to Ion Fury , the throwback shooter of 2019 developed in the Build Engine (the same codey soup from whence Duke Nukem crawled many years previously). But there’s no pre-requisite to understand the story of the predecessor here. If you aren’t following the adventures of Shelly " Bombshell " Harrison, just know that America is under threat and that you and your new cybernetic arm are on a mission to save the day.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/3D Realms

This arm is the beasty melee button that is, admittedly, a little underutilized outside of combat. It can turn an enemy to chunks, with a short cooldown. And alongside other goodies dripfed to Shelly (a bullet-absorbing shield, a powersuit full of health bonuses) it all serves the classic running, gunning and slurping down sodas as you pass them mid-fight. You can also pick up and chuck crates, barrels or - risky - the ticking timebomb of a downed drone.

Full disclosure: I am an easy mark for a nostalgic roll-out of the genre conventions of yore, such as are displayed here. There are monster closests, security cameras that follow your every move, usable vending machines that dispense healing cola, strummable guitars, ceiling fans with adjustable speed controls, arcade machines to play, basketballs with nets that invite you to shoot some hoops, beer taps to pump. The bathrooms are a particular ode to old-school detail. Not content with allowing you to flush the toilets, the developers have made it possible to whip round the toilet roll, run the taps, dispense soap, and tear off paper towel after paper towel.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/3D Realms

When I mentioned this to the RPS gang, Graham asked if it was likely this devotion to incidental interactivity would last past the opening levels. Counter to expectation, it does. I haven’t completed the game, but almost every level has some new silliness to it. A lab with glass test chambers full of robots to incinerate at the press of a button. Firewatch towers with little radios to tune. Before I start piercing the game’s ribcage with my critic’s poker, I do want to establish that the attention to (arguably unnecessary) interactive detail is something I love and often miss in modern shooters.

But holepoke I must. This is a departure from its predecessor in the sense that the fluidity and slipslidiness of the Build Engine has been replaced with slightly more clunkersome movement. So if you have an immovable preference for The Way Things Were, that altered sense of weight might throw you off.

What took me more getting used to was the enemy movement. Soldiers put pressure on you with grenades and ill-advised rush-downs (guys, the lady has a MEGA ARM). While flying drones pester you with agile hovering. All their behaviour makes sense in terms of shootsemsups but something about their dashing, their sudden path changes, feels jerky. And the hardiness of some later enemies undermines the otherwise crackling firearm feedback.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/3D Realms

There’s also some visual communication snafus. Many doors, vents and passageways that look as if they’re accessible don’t really serve a purpose. Some obstructions look pummelable but are not. Some reddish barrels that look Explosive™ are not really Explosive™. Some waist-high surfaces appear mountable, but your knees will not tolerate such an imposition, as if this superhuman woman is offended by the very idea of hoisting. In design vernacular this is an “affordances” issue. In normal human talk, it’s the game not letting you do stuff you expect to be able to do.

At its worst moments this leads to whole areas becoming hard to read. One moment that stands out is a desert pass surrounded by snipers, where the game seems to be saying “don’t step out into the open” when really, the open space is exactly where you have to go. Phantom Fury is going for a kind of “set up and payoff” style of level design. But the payoffs are often unreliable and some of your solutions are simply not accounted for. I got close and hit one of these snipers through the mesh that obscured them, for example. The blood flew out of them, they grunted in pain, but would not die. It was like shooting The Crow.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/3D Realms

I don’t fault the game too hard for these mis-steps. It is the double-edged sword of building an old-school shooter that toys with player expectations. You’ll please players when they press a button and it does something incidental and fun. But then they start investigating everything in every room, and the limited nature of the world becomes apparent. As a player, once you start seeing incidentally interactive objects, you start checking if EVERYTHING is interactive. Ultimately, we can be victims of disappointment because video games, I am often shocked to recall, are not real.

Conversely, as a designer, you have to set the rules of the world firmly while encouraging curiousity and play, building an in-world visual language around what is important, and what is just fluff. Phantom Fury is ambitious in this regard, but it’s a demanding magic trick to pull off. The effect is that you get a lot of laughs, some moments of “haha, neat!” yet other moments in which it’s difficult to know what the game is going to permit. In a setpiece shooter where you are encouraged to be creative, not being able to climb a waist-high ledge, or shoot a man through thin cloth, can be jarring.

That flow-breaking also might occur for some during puzzles where you actually have to stop, breathe, and use your noggin. For example, finding an antler to plug into a taxidermy trophy to reveal a secret lab entrance, when no clues about such a contraption have been previously seeded. There’s also a need to employ the old Doom practice of mentally noting locations of any door locked by a keycard, because although the levels do their best to avoid backtracking, you still often need to make the final leap of logic when it comes to navigating many levels.

Complaints aside, when the triggerhappy setpieces work they are exciting in a retro way. At one point you call in an airstrike via a tactical map on a computer screen while looking out the window at your explosive results in real time. BLOOD! At the end of another level you escape in a helicopter through the grand canyon. In another, you roll through ravines in a jeep, machine-gunning pursuers and hopping out every so often to deal with crane-based physics puzzles; a long sequence reminiscent of the vehicle sections of Half-Life 2 .

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/3D Realms

The train level had me particularly happy and impressed. Keeping a level exciting within such a limited, confined space seems difficult to pull off ( hello, Hitman 3 ) but this showstopper had me thinking back to the crowded carriages of Goldeneye 64 and the railroad ruckusing of Timesplitters Future Perfect , all with great fondness (alas, neither is permitted on our PC-centric best FPS games list). While I’m at it, I’m also big fan of the zombies here - they are numerous and angry and not shy of hurling chairs at you like an overworked teacher who has finally had it with your bullshit.

As I’ve said, I have not seen the whole thing through (I’ve got real trains to catch) but I’m happy with all the time I spent bumsliding across pixellated metal grates and bowling plum-coloured ba-bombs into mutant legs. Phantom Fury sometimes falters in its basic elements (and it can be a little buggy too - fair warning) but its devotion to detail is so laudable I don’t care. Chekhov said that if you have a prop on stage, then that prop must serve a purpose to the story. Hemmingway said, nah, that’s bollocks, inconsequential details are important. Phantom’s Fury feels like the latter; a devotee of inconsequential gizmos. Its clocks are fully animated gif timepieces. Its cream-coloured PCs make clicking hard drive noises when you switch them on. And, very importantly, its toilets flush.

This review was based on a copy of the game provided by the publisher.

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Phantom Fury

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC , Nintendo Switch

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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