Iron Soldier

The Good
Iron Soldier is the first game I played on the Jaguar, way back in 1995. The first thing I noticed about it is the way buildings, helicopters, tanks, trees, etc. explode. Everything turns into many solid chunks of debris, and there is fire and smoke. It looks really cool. Plus, you can bring down every building in the area if you like. In fact, I think there is one mission where that is the goal.

The graphics and audio of Iron Soldier were pretty good for their time. They consist of a decent number of flat-shaded, gouraud shaded, and texture mapped polygons, and the frame rate is fairly smooth as well. The animation of the tanks and helicopters is well done. The sound effects are passable, and there is in-game music. At lot of the early Jaguar games didn't have any in-game music, so it's nice to have.

The Bad
Iron Soldier is a slow-paced game. It feels more like a simulation than anything else. Your IS unit gets up to speed slowly. It turns slowly. It does everything slowly. Unfortunately, there are quick moving tanks and helicopters and planes and rockets coming at you all the time. So you can never really defend yourself against them all. So, your robot is constantly losing shield energy from the attacks, and you will only survive the missions if you memorize where the energy power-up crates are. And while cutting open random buildings with a chainsaw in search of crates is fun for a while, it gets old fast.

Most of the Iron Soldiers 16 missions are way too tough. Especially the escort missions. You have to protect some extremely vulnerable trucks from lots and lots of attacking units, and there is no way your pokey robot can keep up with them all.

If they had just made the Iron Soldier a little faster, or made the enemies not automatically regenerate, the game would be much more enjoyable.

The Bottom Line
Iron Soldier is a good giant robot simulator with great explosions and overly difficult missions.

The Good
The game offers you a first-person view from out of the control window of your Iron Soldier suit. As you walk, the view of the outside sways up and down slightly, giving the game a more realistic feel. As you lumber around, you blast away at tanks, rocket batteries, buildings, aircraft, and even other Iron Soldiers! The graphics, while built from 3D polygons, are very simplistic, with most buildings portrayed as plain colored boxes. But not all of the graphics are vanilla: open fire with your weapons, and you'll grin as you enjoy fantastic explosions with debris mushrooming and cascading down - not just flat 2D fireball sprites. I especially love to chuck grenades at the arrays of fuel tanks you'll see scattered about - one good hit, and you'll wipe out an entire field of buildings - and anything else nearby! I normally don't get that excited about the music in a game, but IS actually has some energetic, catchy tunes. I enjoy the opening scene of the game: we see a view panning down a tall skyscraper to an Iron Soldier with guns blazing - and all the while the theme music is pulsing quickly in the background, setting the mood.

The Bad
I find that the difficulty of the missions seems to be wildly uneven. I've managed to complete some missions after just one or two attempts, yet other missions have taken a dozen or more tries before I finally stumble through to a successful completion. Also, it seems that with some of the missions, you can only compelte the mission by destroying certain targets in a specific order. For example, I must have tried to complete the "Pearl Harbour" mission 15 times before I stumbled onto a sequence of attacks that worked perfectly.

The Bottom Line
IS has a terrific balance between cartoonish arcade action and the realism of a tank simulation. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 5 being an average run-of-the-mill game, I give IS a strong 8.5 - or maybe even a 9!