(I haven’t dumped any money into the game yet to see if there’s a wide disparity in power levels between these units.) Each of these units have three abilities that you can upgrade via spending “Hero Points" which you get from playing the game. The cheapest unlockable hero is $2.99 while the most expensive is $6.99. There’s also optional missions which were also very difficult for me, but perhaps you’re supposed to go back to them after upgrading your hero a few times.Īs far as things you can buy in the game, there’s three hero units you can choose from for free, and six more you can buy. I eventually got through the level without paying, but I really couldn’t tell you if it was my skill level that’s the problem, something I was supposed to be doing that I wasn’t because there isn’t much of a tutorial, or what. I breezed through the first three levels then hit a wall for a while. The fourth level felt artificially difficult to me at first, but I’m still not sure if I just needed to play the game better, use a different strategy, or what. One thing I’m not super sure about just yet is how the difficulty curve of the game and the freemium elements all come into play. It’s fascinating how Iron Marines simultaneously feels like a tower defense game and an RTS game without either element really feeling weaker than the other. Resource generation is constant, and it feels like you’re always juggling moving your soldiers around, upgrading things, and making sure all of your existing tower defenses are doing alright while managing the cooldown abilities of your hero character. The enemies of the early game are very Zerg-like, and are a wide spread between enemies that do area effect damage, flying enemies, powerful siege units, and more. Also, so far, base building is limited to building towers on designated building points and coming across other bases you can take control of. The maps I’ve come across so far have maxxed out at three units (with some units actually being a squad of three of those units) plus your hero character which is totally enough to have competent skirmishes without getting overly complicated and overloading what would be possible with the games’ touch control scheme. For instance, you control a very small number of units at any one time. The way you do all of these things have been distilled down to the genre’s most pure essence. You’ll do things like rescue marines, complete an entire map using just one hero character, build and defend multiple bases, and other things like that. Mission types, at least in the early game, feel just like something you’d come across playing the single player of StarCraft. These two things really helped me with some levels I was having difficulty with. If your units are getting overwhelmed, this can be a lifesaver. There’s also a mini-tower drop gun thing that you can drop on the map which is on your toolbar of icons in the bottom right corner. This will allow you to then drag away from the grouping and move them all at once. Iron Marines’ tutorial leaves a little to be desired, so here’s a couple tips that I figured out while playing: To select multiple units to move them at the same time, double tap a grouping of units that are all standing near each other. Additionally, on a lot of the maps you come across there will be points that you can install towers on, and those towers can then be upgraded a lot like a tower defense game. They’ll then make their way to that location, stop, and fire at anything within range. To move units, you drag them in a way that feels a bit like playing Battleheart ($2.99). The whole game is controlled via a simple touch interface that works almost exactly as you’d expect it to. At times it even feels a little too on the nose when it comes to riffing directly from the Blizzard classic, but with a unique art style and a fascinating blend between tower defense and real time strategy mechanics, Iron Marines manages to feel distinctly different even if it is giving a unbelievably massive hat tip towards the StarCraft universe. At its simplest, the easiest way to describe Iron Marines is that it’s pretty dang close to a mobile version of StarCraft. It’s from the developers of the Kingdom Rush (Free) series, so it’s not much of a surprise that they’d know how to make a really great mobile game. I just got finished playing around an hour or so of Ironhide’s Iron Marines ($2.99), and it’d be hard for my first impressions of the game to be any better.
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