Full Metal Furies asks four players to fight like one. Cellar Door Games built a brawler around that demand, then wrapped it in a puzzle layer that most beat ’em ups never attempt. The studio developed and published the game itself, and it landed on January 17, 2018 for Microsoft Windows and Xbox One, following a February 2017 announcement. Linux, Mac and Nintendo Switch versions followed.
The result is one of the more unusual action games of its year, and the published critical score reflects that: 8.6/10 across six outlets, per the IGDB critic aggregate.
Trailer, via CellarDoorGames.
Four Heroes, One Screen
Full Metal Furies is a team-based brawler. Its own description is blunt about the terms: cooperation is the key to victory. That is not marketing filler here. It is the design thesis, and it shapes everything from combat pacing to how the game expects you to fail.
The game supports single player, multiplayer and co-operative modes. It runs from a bird’s-eye, isometric perspective, which keeps all four fighters legible on one screen at once. That matters more than it sounds. A brawler that asks you to think like a team has to show you the team.
Cellar Door Games is working across genres it does not normally combine. The listing spans puzzle, role-playing, hack and slash, beat ’em up, adventure and indie. That is a wide net, and the game earns most of it.
Athens’ Ashes and an Abstruse Allegory
The setting is strange on purpose. The game pitches itself as “an abstruse allegorical action adventure about atonement, allusions, and alliteration,” set at “an alternate age around Athens’ ashes.”
Read that sentence twice. Atonement, allusions, alliteration. The game is telling you up front that it cares about language and about guilt, and that it intends to be difficult about both.
The premise itself is simple: defend the free world from tyrannical titans. That is the spine. Everything else — the allegory, the wordplay, the classical dressing — hangs off that spine. The game does not hide its ambitions behind them.
What Full Metal Furies does not do is explain itself quickly. The title promises an abstruse experience, and it delivers one. Players who want a brawler to get out of the way and let them hit things will find the game arguing with them.
Rethinking What a Brawler Could Be
The game’s own challenge to the player is explicit: rethink what a brawler could be. That is a high bar to set in a genre built on repetition, and it is the bar Full Metal Furies sets for itself.
The puzzle layer is the clearest answer. Brawlers usually reward reflexes and crowd control. This one adds a second demand on top — reading, deduction, and the willingness to stop hitting and start thinking. The two halves do not always sit easily together, but they are genuinely two halves, not a gimmick bolted to the side.
The co-operative structure reinforces it. A team that splits damage efficiently but ignores the puzzle logic will stall. A team that solves the puzzle but cannot hold the screen will also stall. The game wants both, from the same four people, at the same time.
That is the design bet. It is a real one.
The Case for the 8.6
Here is why the score lands where it does. Full Metal Furies is not a game that wins on polish alone. It wins on the fact that its two systems actually need each other.
Ranked by what the game does best:
- The co-operative demand — four players, one problem, no solo carry.
- The puzzle integration — a second discipline layered onto combat rather than beside it.
- The isometric readability — a full team kept visible and legible on one screen.
- The allegorical framing — atonement, allusions and alliteration as stated themes, not decoration.
- The genre reach — puzzle, RPG, hack and slash, adventure, indie, all in one release.
That order is the argument. The combat is good. The puzzle layer is what makes it worth talking about.
Where the Game Pushes Back
The same qualities that earn Full Metal Furies its score are the ones that will cost it players. An abstruse game is abstruse. A brawler that asks you to rethink the genre is asking for patience the genre rarely trains.
The single-player mode exists, and the game supports it. But the design thesis is teamwork, and a solo run tests that thesis rather than fulfilling it. That is not a flaw in the mode. It is a limit on what the mode can prove.
The allegorical layer is also a commitment. Atonement, allusions and alliteration are the game’s stated concerns, and it pursues them. Players who came for the titans and the fighting may find the game more interested in its own language than they are.
A 2018 Game Worth the Second Look
Full Metal Furies arrived in January 2018 with an announcement a year behind it and a genre mashup that did not fit a clean shelf. It shipped on Microsoft Windows and Xbox One first, then reached Linux, Mac and Nintendo Switch.
Six outlets scored it, and the aggregate came to 8.6/10. That is a strong number for a game this odd, and it is the right number.
The reason is not that Full Metal Furies does everything well. It is that it does one thing almost no brawler does: it makes cooperation a puzzle rather than a multiplier. Four players who fight well will still lose. Four players who think together will win. The game states that plainly and then enforces it.
That is the part worth watching, and it is the part that holds up. Cellar Door Games set out to make players rethink what a brawler could be. Full Metal Furies does not fully answer its own question, but it asks it with more conviction than most games in the genre manage. An abstruse allegorical action adventure about atonement, allusions and alliteration — the pitch is accurate, and so is the score.
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