Iron Brigade (Xbox 360)
For some people, the tower defense genre might seem a little too passive. It is an easy mindset to understand, placing down towers and upgrading them to fight incoming enemies for you is certainly less action-packed then getting in there yourself and dealing the damage personally. Every now and then, a developer takes a crack at mixing tower defense with more traditional action gameplay, and Double Fine Productions’s Iron Brigade, originally named Trenched before a rights dispute, is their attempt at making tower defense a more active affair.
Iron Brigade takes place shortly after World War I, a strange broadcast of unknown origins killing an`yone who hears it save two individuals. The unusual broadcast gives the two surviving recipients the intelligence needed to develop advanced technology way ahead of its time, the first recipient, Frank, using his new knowledge to develop mechanized walking weapons platforms known as mobile trenches. The mobile trenches are mostly seen as a force for good in improving the military might of America, but the other recipient, Farnsworth, went in a different direction. Originally using it to create television, the signal’s message eventually drove Farnsworth mad, leading to him to instead try and spread the message of the broadcast to everyone on Earth despite its mostly deadly nature. Creating technological creatures known as Tubes, Farnsworth’s advanced knowledge can only be countered by the creations of Frank, the player choosing a soldier in Frank’s Iron Brigade to help push back against Farnsworth and take down his many attempts to broadcast the signal to the world. There is co-op available so you don’t have to go every mission alone, players pushing through different continents to try and track down the base of Farnsworth through missions that actually involve defending a fixed location rather than making aggressive forward maneuvers.
The mobile trench is the player’s means of doing anything in Iron Brigade. When placed in a level, the player will be given the goal of protecting certain objects or buildings from being destroyed by invading Tubes, the large insect-like creatures arriving in waves that have a set amount you need to take down before the next wave can be unleashed. The player’s goal is to ensure that the health of whatever they’re protecting isn’t reduced to zero, the mobile trench able to try and stop enemies from getting in attack range either through use of on-board weapons or by calling in towers that will automatically perform certain functions. The towers are most often used as stationary guns, the towers having a certain radius of effectiveness where they’ll fire at anything near enough, the different towers having different advantage. A shotgun tower, for example, is strong against grounded opponents, but you’ll need a different type to fire at aerial enemies, and machine gun towers are able to hit both types of foes but are weaker for their greater versatility. Some towers have less of a focus on the offensive angle, things like towers that can repair your mobile trench, ones that passively collect the scrap from fallen enemies that is used to build and upgrade towers to be more effective, and towers that can slow down nearby Tubes.
Accumulating the resources needed to build the towers is often slow-going, a player able to place them down regularly enough but not having the scrap needed to completely hold off the enemy with them alone, especially since collecting scrap requires you to be near it and it is a bit of a hassle to reach the dropped scrap in your slow moving mech. The mobile trench isn’t just a way of deploying these defensive aids though, as it can pack weapons on board the player is free to fire wherever and whenever they wish, save for the need to reload occasionally of course. The mobile trench can pack weapons such as machine guns, mortars, sniper rifles, and more sci-fi leaning weapons like satellite dishes that can fry Tubes quickly, the weapon efficacy also following a sliding scale similar to weapon towers in that the ones that fire more rapidly and reload quicker are often weaker. Naturally, you’ll want to put out more bullets against the enemy if they’re coming in hugely populated waves, but Tubes can also come in large ponderous forms that you’re better off hitting with something heavy duty. So long as the bases or objects you’re protecting aren’t destroyed, you will win the day, but enemies can and will attack you, and outside of boss battles, you’re luckily able to tank damage much better than what you’re protecting. If reduced to no health, a mobile trench doesn’t get destroyed, it just requires the player to boot it back up again, meaning that they’ll be unable to attack for a short period but it at least doesn’t force a restart if you want to weather the enemy blows as a sacrifice to buy some time for what you’re protecting.
The key to winning on most maps is balancing your own damage output with how much work the towers are putting in, enemies often having multiple routes they can approach from that can’t quite be covered in total by either working alone. The Tubes come in many different types, some focused on numbers rather than strength, others having specialized attacks like sniping from afar, running towards the mobile trench to explode, or targeting towers specifically, the game continuing to mix in new enemy types as the game goes on to always keep the player on their toes. There certainly isn’t much room for passivity, but while most missions do balance the asks of what you and your built towers are doing, the towers are almost useless when it comes to the boss battles. Bosses can often destroy towers in an instant, the battle focusing more on the player’s weapons to carry the battle, but stripping away the second side of things can make these battles a bit too basic, especially since you’re often dealing with one large foe that all you can really do is fire at until it’s dead. Depending on how you do in levels though and how much health is left on whatever you need to keep alive til the end, you will earn both money to spend and special weapons and towers, but while this could be a good reward system that encourages steady growth in strength, it also plays into Iron Brigade’s biggest weakness.
Mixing together shooting action and tower defense is all well and good, but for some reason, Iron Brigade decides to implement an incredibly limiting loadout system as well, meaning that before every level, you must adjust your mobile trench to suit the needs of the upcoming battle. The first issue with this is that you’re not given the best forecast of what the level might contain, although if there are special enemies that require something like aerial weaponry or explosives to kill, the game will indicate to you that you should bring one of that type. However, knowing the general layout of the stage and a few possible foes doesn’t give a good picture of what exactly to pack, and choosing which weapons and towers to bring to a level involves too much micromanaging. The mobile trench’s chassis only has a certain amount of slots for weapons and towers, the different chassis options usually sacrificing one side in favor of the other. You can have six weapon slots on your chasis, but then your tower options are severely limited, and if you go for having plenty of tower options, you’ll be restricted to the smaller guns. Unfortunately, one way Iron Brigade forces the need for cooperation between player and tower is through a system that limits their enjoyment. If you want to bring a big weapon to battle like a mortar, it fills three slots, and a three slot weapon means you’re going to likely only be able to carry two tower types into the battle, so you have to go for the ones that are broadly efficient and simple in effectiveness. So many interesting weapon types and tower types aren’t really able to be enjoyed because you have to keep balancing what you’re bringing into battle. Situational towers and more interesting weapons have to take a back seat, because if you go in with a bad loadout, you might not be able to repel the Tubes as well as you need to. Outside the boss battles where the towers are basically useless, it’s likely you’ll have to stick to similar loadouts across missions, unable to experiment or use the more intriguing choices you keep unlocking because you can’t justify wasting space on them.
The issues with loadout design don’t totally drag things down, but it does lead to things being a bit of a poor mix. The tower defense side now suffers since the need for strategy is boiled down to picking a few broadly effective ones to always use and plop down when able, and the shooting action side isn’t as exciting as it should be since it drifts towards using similar and safe options to avoid losing. The Tubes almost put up too good of a fight, because while levels can become intense battles to try and hold back the constantly invading forces, your options to do so feel restrictive. The map design and enemy types keep things from growing stale even as your loadouts stagnate, but the player’s limited options discourage developing strategies. Funnily enough, it’s likely that the loadout system was designed to try and encourage thoughtful planning, but instead it all trends towards a way of playing that is still decent in core design but doesn’t have the room for exceptional moments or creative approaches. The game almost expects you to have other human players along because then you can balance out the efficient picks with more interesting ones across multiple players, but it doesn’t really change the fact the chassis will always feel like it’s keeping you away from more fun rather than feeding into an experience made more enjoyable because you have to work within your limitations.
THE VERDICT: Iron Brigade hoped to blend the strategic planning of tower defense with the action-packed thrill of third-person shooting, and it did have the potential to do so. The Tubes are a good and varied enemy type that keeps the player involved, requiring action from both the player’s weapons and their constructed towers, and the map designs discourage complacency. Unfortunately, the loadout system encourages complacency all too much. Limited weapon and tower slots along with enemies that require certain choices from the player to even properly counter make the loadout system less about finding fun and interesting ways to hold back the enemy and more about finding something broadly effective to avoid being overwhelmed due to a hole in your defense formed by picking something situational. The basic design of the shooting and tower building prevents this from sinking into total bland repetition, but unless you’re playing with other players to carry the slack, things are going to be a bit too similar across the whole experience to make this genre blend truly exceptional.
And so, I give Iron Brigade for Xbox 360…
An OKAY rating. Double Fine’s vision for a mix of action and tower defense isn’t a bad one, and their level design and the strength of the player pair well to making the game consistently challenging, but the chassis system weakens both halves of the genre blend. Tower defense still requires strategy in placement and knowing when to save up for something stronger or upgrade something already placed in a strong position, but the fact you go into battle with so few towers actually makes it less involved or mentally stimulating than a normal tower defense game. This is balanced out in Iron Brigade by having the action portion of play where you need to be aware and use your weapons right to repel enemies, but you often go into battle with just two weapon types, meaning your shooting stagnates pretty quickly. Of course, that stagnation is then balanced out by the tower defense element giving you something to think about, and this small loop of one making the other’s flaw a little easier to ignore keeps the game from being bad, but it also prevents it from being enjoyed to its fullest.
If you can wrangle up a few human players to cover the bases, Iron Brigade can push through these issues a little to let people pick more unusual options more often, but the decision making and active fighting are still weakened by the chassis system limiting how each player can engage the current threats. Rather than seeing the satisfying results of your towers tearing through waves of enemies or mowing them down yourself, it’s an imprecise balance tipped towards consistent mutual reliance, neither option strong enough to really survive on its own and thus they are only just strong enough to keep things passable when paired together.