Clad in Iron: War of The Pacific 1879

Since nobody else has reviewed the game yet, I figure I’ll give it a go. Before I stumbled across this game deep in Totem’s catalogue, I didn’t even know that Peru, Bolivia, and Chile had even fought a war, much less that said war had involved some extremely cool naval battles. This game does a sort of good job covering an obscure topic. The Good: -Wide variety of ships (Basically all or most of both side’s respective navies are represented) -Accurate gun physics and duels (guns have limited range and aiming, unique to their ship. Big guns do more damage etc) -Cool ship models that are pleasing to the eye -Good variable sea graphics that can be adjusted -Nice strategic map and a good spread of locations -Satisfying sound effects and explosions Now with all that said, there are some negatives and some things I wish they had flushed out in the game. -No tutorial OR manual. (In order to find out how to play this game, I had to read the manual from one of their other games) -Sinking ship physics are not there (when a ship get destroyed it just bubbles and sinks straight down, kind of unsatisfying) -No land models… every map is just featureless open ocean even when you’re fighting on the coast or in harbors -The forts, torpedo boats, and minefields are not represented in the tactical battles, even though it would be more fun if they were -Infantry combat is kind of silly, it would be nice to be able to control the armies like in the Total War games -Did I mention all tactical maps look the same? This has the potential to be an amazing 10/10 game. It’s got an excellent topic and the foundation for a great game. It just feels as if the developers didn’t fully execute the idea that was perhaps already developed. Solid 6.5/10 game in its present form, I will change my rating in the unlikely event the game is updated. In my opinion the game is worth the 3 dollars I paid for it if you’re looking for a good tactical ship battle sim and don’t mind some of the better visual features of other naval sims not being present.

If you change the video settings of this game to either 600 pixel tall options,the settings menu will cut off,meaning you can't change it back without reinstalling the whole game,and this is regardless of what you do with your own screen zoom. As for gameplay...the campaign menu lagged so badly to my mouse inputs I stopped all that I did and made this review. Game needs fixing,and it's been three years since launch at the time of this review.