Iron Soul Review: Robots Vs. Robots

It’s the end of the world as we know it, but you can feel fine.  The robots have been hacked and are taking over.  Who will save us from the hacked robots you ask?  Well none other than another robot.  Iron Soul is a third person shooter with platforming elements.  Killing attacking robots and solving jumping puzzles is the name of the game here.  You control a robot named H-25.  A special type of robot that is immune to all kinds of cyber attacks.  Your task is to save the world from the evil robots.  It seems like the whole experience was not cared for enough, like your fifth grade bully.  This game has a lot of potential but it really falters.

Shots Fired

The game starts with your “father” saying that you were created for a day like this.  The day the robots took over.  As you progress through the game he speaks to you telling you more and more about the story and what your role in the world is.  There is also a purple sphere who talks to you as well.  He tells you little tips about items and game play.  The voice acting is quite poor.  The purple sphere changes the pitch of his voice so often, its hard to take him seriously.  Think of Deckard Cain from the Diablo series going through puberty.  Your maker, or father, refers to you as a son, which seems very odd to me.  He also tries to be funny but it comes across as very forced.  Also when your father speaks to you, you can’t move.  For something who is immune to all cyber attacks, that seems like a pretty good hack job.  Once again it just feels rushed, and was all done on the first take of recording sounds.

If that’s why dad, what does my mom look like?

The controls seems to be the best part of the game.  Standard WASD controls are used with right click aiming and left click to shoot.  There is no shooting from the hip.  You must be aiming to fire a round.  While aiming you can also press Q to zoom in.  This is a good feature if you’re looking to take out video cameras in the distance.  You use space to jump and once you aquire the part, double jump.  The jumping feels nice but sometimes when you double jump you can overshoot the platform which tends to be very annoying.  You can also melee attack which is a kick.  Great for opening boxes.  The only issue I have with the melee attack is that the whole screen shakes when you perform the action, regardless if you hit an object or not.  The gun play feels very unrewarding.  The first gun that is given to you, which in my opinion is the best one, feels like it deals no damage.  It has a limited number of shots until it needs to repair.  You could walk around with one shot left for an hour, shoot once, and it requires a repair.  The lack of a reload, or repair, button certainly hinders the game play.

Let the light shine through

The visuals and sounds seem very rushed, much like everything else.  The sounds of the switches and doors sound like they were taken right out of the Half Life series.  They sound identical.  I hope they made a few phone calls before doing this or else it could really hurt them in the long run.  The visuals look very bland and boring.  Textures look like they are from a few years ago and it really brings down the whole experience.  I noticed an issue with lamps while playing.  It seems as if the ray of light goes right through you as if you aren’t even there at all.  There are not too many lamps of this sort in the game but when you find a gem like this, you can’t avoid it.  There are also some very strange animations.  For example, when standing still and you hit the W key to walk forward, your character sometimes shifts his hips to one direct like he is going to strafe, then straightens out.  Looks funny and would probably hurt if you attempted this in real life.  Feel free to comment below to tell me how it went.  As in any game, there are items inside of breakable boxes and the contents of the boxes are generally a mystery but this isn’t the case in Iron Soul.  Each item has a glowing aura around it and depending on distance, the aura will appear before the box will.

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