Too Long; Didn't Play: Iron Brigade

Sponsored By: My deep-seated need to own complete sets.

Time Dug In: 78 Minutes

Washout review:

Join the Army! See the world! Fight the evil televisions bent on world domination!

Full Tour review:

Last year’s theme (Devolver December) went so unnoticed that I had to try again. Welcome to Double Fine December! We kick off the alliterative annual with Iron Brigade!

Have you ever played Orcs Must Die? If you have, congratulations! You know most of what you need to know to play Iron Brigade: You run around, killing waves of enemies as they charge down predetermined lanes, until you earn enough scrap materials to build turrets to fight for you.

You still have to run around after you build the turrets, because the enemies drop scrap when they die and you have to manually collect it.

Of course, an Orcs Must Die clone wouldn’t be all that interesting without a unique hook, and Iron Brigade has that. Instead of playing a lone soldier on foot in a battlefield, you play a lone soldier piloting a giant mech in a battlefield. It sounds glib when I put it like that, but the game is thematically interesting if nothing else, and it uses a time-frame that is often ignored in video games.

Iron Brigade takes place in an alternate timeline where alien technology was discovered by two wounded veterans after the First World War. The first vet takes the technology and uses it to replace his legs, inventing the technology to build giant mechs (or, as they’re called in-game, “mobile trenches”). The second, who has a suspiciously Eastern-European accent, invents television – but not just any television: evil, murderous, flying televisions that are bent on world domination.

So basically just like now, except they fly.

Ok, so the plot of the game sounds like something that would come out of that federal department that keeps putting on radio ads telling kids to turn off the television and go outside instead. You know the ones. They air during your afternoon commute and feature Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck because the kids are totally still into those guys these days. (Bugs is da bomb and Daffy is da Shiznit!)

You come in as the son of the man who invented the mech technology. The war against the evil televisions is going poorly, and it’s up to you and your giant robot to push them back.

Another way that Iron Brigade differentiates itself from Orcs Must Die is that Iron Brigade allows you to customize your mech for the kind of player you want to be. So far I’ve unlocked three configurations. The starter set has four slots for weapons (two for each shoulder) and three slots for your emplacements. The Engineering set has two slots for weapons but lets you carry four emplacements. The Assault set lets you carry five slots of weapons (two on one shoulder, three on the other) but only two emplacements. Some weapons take up more than one slot, so if you want to bring that three-slot sniper rifle, you’re forced into the Assault Class.

Your standard weapons are mapped to the left and right mouse button. Left fires everything on your left shoulder, and right fires everything on your right shoulder. It’s an intuitive system that I can’t think of anything funny to say about, so I’m going to move on.

The turrets come in a lot of flavors. There are support turrets, which do things like slow enemies down or collect scrap materials automatically. Of course, neither of those turrets are worth much without the offensive turrets, which come in shotgun (for ground targets), flak (for aerial targets) and mortar (for hardened targets). All of this is your standard tower-defense fare. You lay them down where you think there will be a bottleneck, and then frantically run back and forth between the lanes because the turrets are largely useless until they’ve been upgraded.

The key, as with any tower-defense game like this, is never to spread yourself too thin. Defend one or two lanes with turrets, and mop up the third yourself. You’re not going to earn enough scrap to make all of the lanes self-sufficient, which is a pity, since that’s my favorite thing about tower-defense games. To me, nothing is more satisfying than laying down an impenetrable gauntlet from hell and watching wave after wave of enemies march into the meat grinder.

As with any Double Fine game, the thing that really sticks is the theme. Iron Brigade goes for that brightly parodic “The Army’s Not the Army Anymore! Buy War Bonds!” motif that any game that takes place in the 1940’s is legally required to adopt under the WPA. Frankly, I’m starting to get a little tired of it, but the success of the Fallout “let’s treat everyone from the 1950s like a blithering idiot” model guarantees this sort of thing will continue.

Graphically the game is, well, a polygonal Double Fine game. It doesn’t look anywhere close to bad, but it’s not as polished as it might have been. Double Fine has always been about the story and gameplay, and Iron Brigade surely has those, so I’m willing to cut them a little slack for some stiff character animations. Anyway, who’s looking at the people in a game like this anyway?

The voice work is top-notch, though. There are only two voiced characters, and they both capture the campy essence of the game’s soul to perfection. Not a wink or a nod anywhere, just two larger-than-life characters in larger-than-life situations fighting larger-than-life robots.

For me, Double Fine games tend to have this quality about them where I like every part of them individually, but when they’re all put together they don’t quite gel. There’s nothing I can point to in Iron Brigade that I would say “If only they had done this, the game would be better.” It’s not a bad game by any stretch. It’s just not for me.

March On, Soldier?

I will likely give the game some more of my time, but I won’t be finishing it. This isn’t a knock against the game, as I didn’t finish Orcs Must Die either and Orcs Must Die is, so long as we’re being honest, the better game. I like the setting, I like the plot, and the gameplay is solid, but this sort of tower-defense game usually gets to a point where I’m barely squeaking by to finish levels, and I can never figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Rather than looking at that and trying to actually grow as a gamer, I just stop playing before I get to that point.

Is it the Bloodborne of Action Tower Defense?

Let’s pause a moment to consider how a game becomes the Bloodborne of its genre. First, it must be punishingly difficult. That is, however, not enough. Any game can be difficult. It has to be difficult in a way reminiscent of a jailhouse key left temptingly on the edge of the guard’s chair. That is to say, it must be close enough to be frustratingly far from reach unless you’re willing to injure yourself to get it. Finally, it has to be absolutely indifferent to the fact that you just dislocated your shoulder reaching for the key.

Iron Brigade has none of that. It is not a terribly difficult example of its genre, and it holds your hand through the first 78 minutes as it introduces one enemy type and the strategy to beat it per level. There may well be a vicious difficulty spike later in the game – in my experience with this kind of game, there generally is – but based on the format of this review I can’t give it the coveted Bloodborne Equivalence Award.

Maybe next week’s Double Fine game will earn it, eh?

Comments

This was the game in the hybrid-tower defense genre that clicked with me. I'm not sure if it was the style, or the level design (which feels comprehensible even when the scale starts increasing), or simply that I had a group to play co-op with, but I sunk a huge amount of time into this when it first came out on 360 back when it was Trenched, and just reading this is giving me the urge to pick it up on Steam and revisit it. (Incidentally, the back third of the game and the expansion do have some significant difficulty in them.)

doubtingthomas396 wrote:

... I like every part of them individually, but when they’re all put together they don’t quite gel.

That is a fantastic way of phrasing the ambivalence I feel towards this game. And I own (and don't play) it on two platforms now.

Edit: Three platforms. Forgot it was in a Humble Bundle at some point.

Rather than looking at that and trying to actually grow as a gamer, I just stop playing before I get to that point.

Iron Brigade is an Orcs Must Die clone? The respective Wikipedia entries indicate that it came out a few months before Orcs Must Die.

I really liked Iron Brigade. It was the last DoubleFine game that really clicked with me and the loot/upgrade cycle was as compelling as any modern ARPG. But then, I've been well disposed towards the "action tower defense" genre going back to the late '90s Battlezone games.

polq37 wrote:

Iron Brigade is an Orcs Must Die clone? The respective Wikipedia entries indicate that it came out a few months before Orcs Must Die.

My research said OmD came first, but it's not like I haven't been wrong before. Just read my review of Blue Flamingo.

I really had fun with Iron Brigade, but there is a big difficulty spike later. In fact, the expansion levels start approaching "impossible without a buddy" territory. I got stuck halfway through the expansion. Then they removed GFWL....and everybody lost their saves.

AUs_TBirD wrote:

I really had fun with Iron Brigade, but there is a big difficulty spike later. In fact, the expansion levels start approaching "impossible without a buddy" territory. I got stuck halfway through the expansion. Then they removed GFWL....and everybody lost their saves.

HA! You too huh? I played co-op with a buddy through the main game and it was brilliant! We finished it and started the "Martian Bear" expansion and boy, does that difficulty ever spike. We are a few missions into it. Lucky for me, the GFWL thing occurred relatively early in my play through (I was late to the party) but I thought it was absolutely ABSURD that a dev could wipe my game progress with no prior warning or choice in the matter. I made a post and everything. Despite the game being relatively niche, I thought that this would be a much larger discussion in the gaming community, but I guess I was wrong.

That really soured me on doublefine and the game in general.

Still, very much a fun game though. Add me on steam (Sentient_d) if you ever wanna play co-op some time.

Rezzy wrote:
doubtingthomas396 wrote:

... I like every part of them individually, but when they’re all put together they don’t quite gel.

That is a fantastic way of phrasing the ambivalence I feel towards everything from Double Fire.

FTFM

You’re not going to earn enough scrap to make all of the lanes self-sufficient, which is a pity, since that’s my favorite thing about tower-defense games. To me, nothing is more satisfying than laying down an impenetrable gauntlet from hell and watching wave after wave of enemies march into the meat grinder

This is also my biggest complaint about Orcs Must Die. I wish you really could just defend with only traps. The only game in this third-person style that I can think of that allows you to win with traps alone is the Deception series (and really you can only win that way).

In any case, I unlocked everything for this game on 360 (when it was Trenched), but I bought it and have hardly played it on PC.

I don't really think it's fair to call either OMD or IB a clone of the other. They were so closely released they were just the same idea that arose at basically the same time.

I genuinely enjoyed the campaign on my own up to a point, but for me, the real meat of this game was playing both the campaign and (even better) the "endless" Survival mode cooperatively with two or three friends. The game really shined when played cooperatively with a group of people who communicated!

Iron Brigade (back when it was Trenched on the 360) was the first game that I really played with other Goodjers. I had a lot of fun and the game really, really shone with others. With a real good team, you were pretty much invincible and steamrolled everything.