My Review Of iron Brigade:
iron Brigade is a third-person shooter crossed with a tower defence game by Double Fine. The game is set in an alternate history during World War Two where the main antagonist "Vladimir Farnsworth" and the protagonist's commander "Frank Woodruff" (both of whom are disabled) were at an allied listening post listening into axis radio signals, when a strange broadcast of unknown origin comes through the radios. This broadcast either kills or drives everyone in the listening post to insanity, except for Farnsworth and Woodruff who instead of dying or going insane gained super intelligence.
Woodruff used his new-found intelligence to create bi-pedal mechs for injured soldiers of the current conflict. This gained Woodruff much popularity But Farnsworth used his gift to create a network of machines that are very similar to television and the internet (called mono-visions in-game) so that injured/ disabled people don't have to go anywhere and can effectively bring the world to them. Farnsworth's creation is shunned and the fact Woodruff's invention is liked so much more than his drives Farnsworth to madness and thus creates electrical creatures( Nicknamed as Tubes) and declarers war on everyone so that he can force "The broadcast" onto everyone. in the maw of war Woodruff creates bi-pedal, tri-pedal and quadra-pedal war machines that are the equivalent of mobile trenches and therefore creates "The Mobile Trench Brigade".
You start the game in the tutorial level defending an ammunition depot from an onslaught of "Tubes". The way you can tell if something is a defence point at a glance is that defence points are surrounded by blinking green lights as well as having a HUD icon. The tutorial level as well as serving as the tutorial it also introduces the basic melee and ranged "Tubes" known as Resistors and Tommys respectively.
This mission also shows the power that Farnsworth has by ending with your bi-pedal base that is also a ship having to beach itself to save you from an insurmountable number of "Tubes" for the current "Trench" that you have as it is armed with the worst mounted machine guns and emplacements in the game.
As you progress in the game you will gain experience, collect new emplacements as well trench components by completing levels and opening randomly dropped "loot boxes". You can also purchase new equipment from a store on your ship/base. The game's difficulty curve is a little off as some loot drops randomly and that can mean that you are ill prepared to go into the next level for example the most powerful sniper cannon in the game (known as the Gungnir) can only be obtained from loot boxes and is the fastest way to kill the bosses in the game.
The system the game employs for trench customisation is that there are six different categories of weapons that you can mount to your trench, these categories are : machineguns that take up one slot(there are exceptions), shotguns that take up one slot, sniper cannons that take up two slots (the only exception being the Gungnir which takes up 3 slots), grenade launchers that take up 2 slots, artillery cannons that take up 3 slots and broadcasters that take up 3 slots.
There are 3 chassis types that you can employ: engineering chassis, standard chassis and assault chassis. these different chassis' vary in the amount of armour they have the number of weapon slots/ hard points the have and the number(up to a max of four) and type of emplacements they can bring on missions.
There are three different types of emplacements that you can bring into missions, there are light turrets like machine gun turrets(can attack air and ground targets), shotgun/camo shotgun turrets(can only attack ground targets) and anti-air flak turrets(can only attack air targets). There are also heavy turrets like sniper turrets (can attack air and ground targets), mine dployers( spit out a ring of anti- ground mines) and mortar turrets(can only attach ground targets).
Finally there are support turrets like repair cranes to fix your trench, dampening generators that slow enemies in a small radius around them and collection prongs that automatically collect the in-game resource know as "scrap".
The only missions in the game that do not subscribe to the tower defence theme of the game are the boss battles as you do not have to defend an objective, instead you have to destroy a very large opponent while being assaulted by smaller enemies.
The graphics style of the game is cartoony drawing with realistic details for example: dirt on you trench or askew sandbags surrounding your trench's pilot. By today's standards the graphics style has not aged to badly and it runs adequately on my computer which I would consider to be the average power of a modern computer.
Something that has not aged so well is the quality of the models, there are allot of obvious edges and corners on the character models when on the mission select screen but when on missions it is much less noticeable as the camera is much farther away from everything.
The multi-player aspect of this is very basic, it uses a matchmaker to create groups of players instead of having a list of available game servers, but this is excusable as the game was originally on the Xbox 360 and was ported to the PC.
There is also the option to directly invite players from your friends' list into a group. the matchmaker can either match you with others immediately, after a few hours or anywhere in-between.
Finally there is also the chance that when loading into a mission that the connection between players could drop and you will either be sent back to your ship of put into the mission alone, but when the multi-player works it works beautifully and is a very enjoyable experience.
Personaly I believe that this game is more than worth anyone's time as it can provide a good laugh with the jokes that it makes and is quite challenging even with a full group of four people.
