Tom's Gaming Blog

Iron Marines is both a casual and a hardcore experience at the same time. Yes, I know, it sounds weird, but it really is. The presentation and everything around that screams welcome to casual Ville – stay a while for an easy time. However, if you play on “hard” (which I did) the experience is anything less. The developers behind the game are Ironhide Game Studio and are known for their awesome series of tower defense game series Kingdom Rush. This is their first venture into the RTS genre, and it’s not a bad first try, but it comes with some frustration. I had a good time in general, especially for only 5 bucks spent on it, but I think the last area of the campaign was a mistake. As it usually goes, later areas are harder and require more from you, and I got nothing against that. However, the devs made the game harder through frustration, that in my opinion ruins the fun of playing an RTS – to actually kill stuff. You see, instead of making the enemies harder, now each dead unit heals another, and it has the effect of being the worst case of HP bloat I have ever seen – particularly going from one campaign section to another… It was like night and day, and it drained all the fun I was having in one go.