Iron Helix

The Good
When Iron Helix came out the whole idea of a CD-based game was very new. I think this might have been the second or third I remember on the Mac, and the Mac CD games generally predated the PC side. So as you might imagine, the game is heavy on the loaded visuals, and they did a pretty great job of it. There's also voice recordings from the crew and some animations as well. All in all a very worthy first effort.

The Bad
The utterly ridiculous story, for one. Ok so the crew of a ship is infected and dies. Gotcha. Then it flies to an enemy planet with the intent of destroying it? Huh? And is Iron Helix the virus that attacked the crew, or the virus that eats planets, or both? And the opening movie shows the O'Brien in the middle of a fleet, why didn't they just shoot her? How did I become the closest ship? Ok whatever.

Actually the only serious problem with this game is that is has zero replay value. I won't go into describing it, it has to be experienced. That said, the first play-through is fun enough to make this a worthwhile experience overall.

The Bottom Line
Iron Helix is basically a graphical adventure game, but rendered in 3D and including animations and other flourishes. The basic conceit of the game is that the different areas of the ship are locked off by scanners that examine the genetic material of the person before allowing them to pass. When the virus attacked the crew it mutated their DNA and they were unable to operate the ship. Eventually the ship's defensive robot started attacking them.

You are called in as the closest ship that can reach the O'Brien and stop her. There are a couple of different ways to do this, from simply pressing a button on a command console, to causing her engines to explode. However, you'll have to get to these controls first, and you'll need to find unmutated DNA to do this.

After the game starts and shows you sending in your robot probe, you start the game in an access area. By scanning the walls you can find the original DNA, pre-mutations, of some of the low-level workers. That will get you into the first few areas of the ship, where you'll have to find the haunts of the higher ranking members of the crew, collect their DNA, and continue. You'll also find crew recordings which can be helpful in telling you ways to find other DNA or solutions to the game.

Eventually you'll find DNA that will allow you to access critical areas of the ship, ones that will allow you to take control of her and stop it from attacking the planet.

While your robot is moving about the ship, the defensive robot is still active. At the lowest level of the game it is visible on your map, and is thus fairly easy to avoid. It does respond to you opening doors or using the inter-deck elevator, which means you have to keep moving to avoid it. At higher levels it responds to more events, moves more quickly, and is no longer visible on you map. This makes an encounter extremely likely, and they're always deadly.

The idea of moving around and pressing buttons to unlock areas might not sound like much fun, but the graphics really added to the immersion. The defensive robot was also a feature that has to be experienced, there were many moments of heart-pounding fear when I just scrapped past it and didn't know if it had seen me yet.