Iron Blight

This is one of those cases where I’d love to give it a middle thumb. Where the game really shines is in its atmosphere, gunplay and exploration – qualities I’d already noticed and appreciated in the demo. The gunplay is solid overall. The bolt-action sniper rifle fires slowly and has a strong recoil, but it packs an extremely powerful punch. The pistol is our first weapon; it fires quickly, reloads quickly, but doesn’t deal all that much damage. Then there are shotguns, SMGs and a few melee weapons. Melle weapons break after a few hits. The selection is solid, perhaps even a little too large for the comparatively small inventory. The fact that weapons sometimes jam, shotguns need to be manually pumped and, if you prefer, there’s no magazine integration, are all nice touches that naturally blend into the gameplay. You can also find gun mods, such as scopes, magazines and silencers, and it feels really satisfying when your rifle has a scope for easier aiming on long ranges or your revolver has a muzzle brake to reduce recoil. The atmosphere always feels pleasantly eerie. An enemy could be lurking round every corner; you have to be on your guard, only to realise that sometimes you’re all alone and your mind is playing tricks on you. The comparison with Cry of Fear is definitely apt here. Exploring is also fun thanks to the map; you always know where you’ve already been and, thanks to the markers, where there’s still an obstacle to overcome. What the game really doesn’t do well, however, are the story, the enemies, a few minor bugs and inventory management. I don’t want to say there’s no story, because that would be completely wrong, but you can sum it up in two or three fairly short sentences. The ending is also strangely abrupt and the two chapters also feel as though two different games have been glued together. Chapter one, which made up the demo, is really great, and exploring the building complex is fun. Chapter two, set in the realistic modelled city, plays more as if you were in an unnecessarily big hub world and, ultimately, just head off to smaller – far too small – levels. No surprise here: the apartment block works best in this one too. Of course, there are plenty of games that are carried by their gameplay, with the story serving merely as a justification for it all, but that’s not the case here – unlike the devs’ other project, Aquametsis, where I’m not sure if there’s a story, though I also really enjoyed the demo. I only really came across a few bugs. Towards the end, when you’re fighting military units, a couple of them spawned quite close in front of me, and on one occasion the game saved my character in a hollow from which I couldn’t escape – due to the lack of a jump function – and had to reload a state, which was about 30 minutes before that point. Unfortunately, ammunition doesn’t stack either. For example: I have a box with ten rounds, one with one, and one with nine. This takes up three inventory slots, although I think it should simply merge into two boxes of ten rounds each. Perhaps it’s a deliberate design choice. From chapter two onwards, the enemies leave a lot to be desired. Whilst in the first chapter there were three or four types of enemy that were fairly balanced, here there are seven or eight, half of which simply feel like bullet sponges. Then there are also sections where enemies only spawn once you’re close enough to them. At the train depot, for example, you could in theory snipe the enemies from a good vantage point, if you have the ammo, but in practice these enemies only spawn once you’ve gone down the stairs and are just about five metres away from them. There are also sections where you’re suddenly bombarded with enemies, for example when you’re walking through the warehouse in the supermarket. Usually you’re fighting a maximum of two or three enemies, occasionally four, but in such sections there are easily eight to ten or even more at once storming towards you. I hope that my purchase has helped support the development of Aquametsis and that the developers have learnt from this game.