Iron Storm Preview

There have been a great number of war-based shooters for the PC in recent years. Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, America's Army, Operation Flashpoint--the list goes on and on. To this distinguished list we will soon be able to add Iron Storm, a first- and third-person shooter from Dreamcatcher Interactive and 4x Studios that has the distinction of taking place in a largely fictional universe rather than being limited by historical accuracy.

Iron Storm is set in 1964, in a Europe still in the throes of World War I. You assume the role of Lieutenant James Anderson, part of the Allied forces from America and Western Europe, which are at war with the Russian-Mongol Empire, led by Baron Nikolai Aleksandrovitch Ugenberg, who is compared to Ghengis Khan and is said to have put "a bloody end to the Bolshevik revolution." Because it takes place in 1964 (albeit an alternative 1964), the game is not limited to wartime elements from World War I. It combines the sort of trench warfare from WWI with ideas from the wars that followed, such as tanks, flamethrowers, helicopters, and electronic equipment.

The first thing you'll notice upon entering the game is how the developers have attempted to create a world that has been at war for half a century. Everything is run down and dirty, buildings are mere piles of rubble, and trenches with barbed wire are everywhere. One wrong step, and you'll walk right over a poorly placed land mine. The second you step outside of the bunker you're briefed in, you'll find yourself right in the trenches, with helicopters flying overhead and gunshots zipping all around you. It becomes clear very quickly that you need to watch where you go and think very carefully about when you decide to stand up. Snipers are placed all around the battlefield, and wouldn't you know it, your character is the one given the job of taking them out.

Doing so is no small task. Aside from the snipers, you have to deal with enemy troops who have stormed into your trenches and are determined to see you fail. Fortunately, you're backed up by Allied troops, although they seem to be best used to draw away enemy fire while you go to work. While they do fire at the enemy, their AI leaves something to be desired, and it can sometimes seem as if they're cattle being sent to the slaughter rather than real teammates.

The one thing you do have on your side is an abundance of firepower, as your character can carry an impressive arsenal. While you can carry only one heavy weapon at a time, you can carry it in tandem with a saber, a silenced pistol, a shotgun, two kinds of grenades, land mines, and a sniper rifle. You'll also come across mounted weapons, and there's no better feeling than just barely making it to a mounted machine gun and turning it on your oncoming assailants.

The gameplay in the missions varies from the sort of straightforward "mow 'em down" fighting from some shooters to much more strategic maneuvering around a battlefield, small town, or enemy bunker, where being spotted is tantamount to suicide. While Iron Storm doesn't have the sort of objectives system featured in other games, you are periodically contacted by your superior officer, who lets you know where you have to go, and it's rare that you'll find yourself wandering aimlessly around an area already cleared of enemies.

Live in Gritty 3D

Iron Storm is powered by 4x Studios' Phoenix 3D engine, and the technology is certainly up to the task of depicting the war-torn world featured in the game. It lacks some of the more advanced features of the Unreal or Quake III Arena engines, but it nonetheless allows for some good detail in the characters and scenery. You're given the option of playing in either a first- or third-person perspective, and one nice feature of the third-person point of view is that you'll actually be able to see every weapon you're carrying.

The game defaults to a third-person perspective, and while we quickly switched to a first-person perspective the first time around, it didn't take long to realize that was a mistake. At its heart Iron Storm is a shooter, but much of the game involves very precise sneaking from place to place, something that is much, much easier when you can actually see above your character's head. We still switched back to the first-person perspective whenever we were caught in a firefight, but for general-purpose infiltration, the third-person camera was clearly the way to go.

All this perspective switching is necessary because the enemy AI is devilish, to say the least. Snipers are always looking for you, and they have seemingly endless supplies of ammunition to draw upon. They will avoid your fire by running and jumping out of the way, and they have no qualms about chasing after you down long hallways or trenches (in cases like that, your best bet is to lay down a few carefully placed mines and run for your life). Because Iron Storm's Europe is in tatters, the scenery offers few places to hide from enemy fire, and the places that are available rarely provide complete cover. If you take a moment to regroup, you'd better be sure there's nobody lurking around one of those corners, or you won't last very long.

Aside from its six-mission single-player campaign, which takes you from the front lines to the Reichstag in Berlin, Iron Storm ships with the sort of multiplayer component everyone has come to expect from games of this nature. The game features deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag modes, and up to 16 players are supported either locally or online. Each of the multiplayer maps fits right in with the generally dilapidated world of Iron Storm, and there's certainly something to be said for playing capture the flag in a small German town that's been bombed back to the Stone Age or in WWI-style bunkers. Depending on the team you're on, you'll have access to slightly different weapons at the beginning of a match, although it's easy enough to pick different weapons up from the body of a fallen enemy.

The build we were sent was labeled a "master candidate," and by and large it ran well on a reasonably high-end system with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200. There were no instances of slowdown or gameplay problems, although we did experience one problem with our Sound Blaster Live! card that caused the game to emit screeching (and excruciatingly painful) static. Hopefully this problem will be solved before the game ships, as our hardware configuration is pretty common. Assuming the developers overcome that last bug, the game should be good to go, and Dreamcatcher Interactive will release it in North America this October.