Reviews

Iron Knights Review: A Game With A lot Of Potential That Is Wasted

So there are times where games look really promising, but once you give them enough time, you see how they don’t come even close to you expectations. This is one of those times. When I first saw the game and trailer, I actually thought this looks pretty awesome, but as soon as I finished the abilitease (no typo here) tutorial, I immediately got the idea.

It’s a grinding game. Simple as that. Ever played Hello Hero? Well, it’s the exact same thing, except it’s not turn based and there’s “free movement” (which might as well not exist seeing how it’s a straight corridor every time anyway). There is no actual dungeons or maps to explore like in Dungeon Hunter or even Eternity Warriors. Simple corridor with 3-4 spots where 2-5 enemies spawn at a time. This alone makes the game very repetitive to start with.

Being it an action game, there is obviously combat. The combat does look and feel good. Hits and special moves have a powerful feel and the shiny effects are quite good to look at, even though often I feel like they are there to mask animations that don’t make sense. Still, I like it, even on low details it’s enjoyable. What isn’t enjoyable is false advertisement. If you watch the trailer you will see that it features skill and attack combos. This is just plain false, there is no actual combo system, just a hit counter with a timer on it, but no actual move combination. You use a skill, then you return to a “neutral stance” and a second later you use the other skill. Simply put, there is no combat flow. This is not really that big of a deal, but since they are advertising it, it needs to be pointed out as broken or non-existent.

So this sounds mediocre’ish right? Well, let’s go downhill some more. The controls are quite bad. You automatically aim towards enemies, even if you are holding the movement stick in the other direction, as long as there is an enemy near you, you cant attack anything else (so forget about explosive barrels/crates). There is another thing worth mentioning, which is elemental advantage/weakness, but we’ll take about that later.

So, as you play you will get “allies”, which are pretty much non-playable characters that go along with you and fight. They also level up and can equip items. This is done in the exact same way as Hello Hero, except there the creatures looked really creative, while here there is just this generic feel to them. They can’t use skills and they can die (not permanently) in battle so you might want to use your bad allies first and keep the good ones for the boss fights.

This brings me to the last gameplay thing I want to comment on – the loot system. It is… horrible. Not only you have a very low limit on things you can stack, but the stuff you get is either useless things for your allies, or gold. Armor and weapons are unbelievably rare to get it seems. I’ve played over 50 missions and I got 2 swords (1 green, which is not saying much) and 3 armors for my character. There is also no way to just buy new equipment, you can spend real money on currency and buy what is essentially “gambling cards” where you hope to get something good.

There are a few more things gameplay-wise that could be touched on (friend invites, boss raids etc.) but honestly I don’t think they are worth commenting as they don’t really offer anything different than the main mode.

The last thing worth mentioning before we move on is the “epic story”. If there is one, I didn’t get to see it. All I got is the tutorial messages and nothing else. I thought there was a bug and I just skipped it, but on both my devices I didn’t get a story so I’ll just add it to the false advertisement list.

Lets move on to the graphics. The presentation at first glance is pretty good. Nice special effects, decent level of details on the models…but then you start to notice the world textures. The textures themselves are mediocre at best, which doesn’t really matter, but in many points I could clearly see that they don’t even fit together properly. It actually reminded me of the Quake 1 (PC) age. Still, the overall graphics are serviceable.

The music on the other hand is not. It’s bad. That’s all I can say. For an action game, there is nothing epic or adrenaline-rushing about it. Just turn it off and play some music from your PC.

The final thing that you need to be aware of – the monetization. Where Hello Hero got it right, this got it wrong. You will be constantly bombarded with requests to review the game (I encourage you to complain about this in your review), or big boxes prompting you to spend $100 on some random-chance pack. The problem here lies in two simple things:

1) Everything you buy is a gamble, you could get something good or something terrible, there is no fixed prize
2) All the popups are for the $100 packs, I only once saw a $10 one on the main screen.

Tip for the developer: you might want you try advertising the cheaper ones guys. The difficulty up to Act 4 seemed okay, assuming you take your time to clear each stage the required number of times. If you decide to go straight to the next stage as soon as you can, you won’t get past Act 2. I wouldn’t call it a predatory game, I’d rather use highly the term repetitive. My overall thoughts – this is a wasted opportunity. A concept with a lot of promise that turned out to be a very forgettable and mediocre at best game. I am not sure if they started this as a dungeon crawler game and just switched it in the middle of production, but between he okay’ish combat, bad music and extremely repetitive levels (if you even call them “levels”… I mean there’s just one that is re-skinned), I’d rather recommend Hello Hero over this one.

If the developers read this article – I’d honestly recommend you to take this game, add real levels and a loot system with random stats on items and release it as a separate game, trust me, it’ll do much better than what you have right now.

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