Everything begins with a bit of narration supported quite nicely by some good voice acting, which is thankfully present throughout. The flow of words is occasionally broken by the characters, but messages and videos all sound better than they look, and having the characters actually speak their native tongues (with subtitles added) adds to the immersion. Designed to be played in either third- or first-person view, the views were combined for a nice effect where you can actually see the rest of the body when viewed from inside, although the clipping is atrocious. All in all, the graphics are certainly nothing special and appear off an engine from quite a few years ago, but the trade-off is that it runs beautifully on any machine from the same timeframe. The animation could have helped pump that back up, but unfortunately everything and everyone moves very stiffly and robotically.

In an attempt to help with the realism factor, it is much easier to die in Iron Storm then in many traditional games of this ilk. That provides a better feel for the game, but cheap deaths are rampant throughout. No attempt is even made at hiding the blatantly linear paths at times, and surviving is very much trial runs to discover enemy locations and then sweeping through multiple times for increased performance. There is generally one straight path early on, with the occasional side path or hidden extra, but they don’t open up until well into the game. The surroundings are generally well done, with good textures and a nice continuous feel throughout evoking that sense of dirty war quite well. This helps make up for the very low polygon counts on the blocky areas and people, although things do tend to look quite similar.

Death comes swiftly and is usually unseen (makes perfect sense for war), but learning to out-snipe an area isn’t always very fun and many enemies can kill in a single hit. Early on there is an assault by dogs with mines attached, which perform suicide runs and blow up on touch, providing a very annoying adversary. However, the levels are peppered with checkpoints, so it’s never far to go whenever you die, even if you forget to manually save.

Enemies have a bit of life in them previous to a fight, with conversations being held as they casually patrol their routes and hang around encampments. If they are unprepared for an attack it will actually take a moment to draw a weapon – although the same goes for our hero – which rather impressed me on the detail side of things. Unfortunately, once a battle begins, soldiers become nothing more then typical cannon fodder, with little movement and poor tactics. They tend to only have two positions: standing and crouching while unable to run and shoot very well, absolutely paling in the face of Half-Life’s troops. They don’t appear very able to lay prone and have no concept of taking cover (unless they run behind a wall by accident). They are little more then sheep.

But if there is anything this game does superbly (aside from the sound), it is most definitely the weapons. The game makes available a series of stylistic hybrids made up from old-fashioned bullet-spewers with twists added; even though the effects remain the same they still have some awesome designs. True to form, they perform their simple task of dealing out hot lead and not much else, but they do it very well with a wide selection to choose from. Only one gun from each category can be held at a time (which hurt my want carry around nothing but assault rifles), which adds a slight bit of strategy into the mix. Choices must be made that can affect how firefights will progress thanks to changing abilities in weapons. Ammo availability can sometimes be extremely sporadic, as many snipers hide out in inaccessible areas that cut off your ability to steal their bullets, while assault rifles lay around everywhere. This leads to a leaning in weapon selection, and sometimes being forced to use weapons not designed for certain jobs.

A lot of the concepts and ideas Iron Storm has are excellent, but the game still needs a bit of work before it lives up to those. If anything, I kept playing for the weapons and some of the later scenery, as the actual combat certainly wasn’t anything new or even very polished. It would have been better if the enemies were at least more competent and made firefights interesting - instead of simply getting mowed down like in an action movie, which certainly made no sense considering the rest of the game’s feel.

. . . MechDeus