Iron marines play through youtube upgrade#

Rangers can become Engineers to take out a building and then switch to Snipers to provide some precise long-range fire. Being limited by Command Points, you can change the role of your squad mid-mission. Engineers take out buildings, Snipers are your long-ranged firepower, and Rangers are adept at taking out Fell monsters. The troops in Iron Marines are very focused on particular tasks. Unlike Alien Tribe 2 which distills the RTS experience down to the base building and harvesting elements, Iron Marines tries to give you all three by condensing them to fit into the limitations of the mobile device. Upgrading troops via tech tree happens between missions, leaving you with nothing but the map to look at during a scenario. In later missions three alien troop types fall under your purview as well. Finally, Iron Marines limits you to three types of infantry or vehicles that you have access to. Your main base automatically harvests Etherwatt so that removes the need for drones. Games typically start with one or two slots (called Command Points) and as you open up the map and take control of more areas, more troops fall under your command as well.

Iron marines play through youtube upgrade#

These sites either give you a resource called Etherwatt that you use to build troops, turrets, upgrade facilities, or unlock more troops slots. The resource allocation method of the game requires you to remove Fell structures and then use your squads or hero to acquire the site. So how does Iron Marines address these issues? If only mining were this easy in real life Bases can’t sprawl across the game area and its likely impossible to display the entirety of an RTS build tree on a phone screen. Thus, you can’t deftly control a host of mining drones a’la Starcraft much less have them taking up precious screen real estate. Mobile screens are physically smaller than desktop monitors (not accounting for pixel density) and, while no-one actually has hotdog fingers, the finger is much less precise than a mouse.

The RTS genre has three major themes – resource harvesting, base building and troop tech trees. The first three missions are tutorials but all eight missions have a variety of goals from protecting civilian populations, re-establishing communications devices, and rescuing an alien ambassador.Ī mobile RTS is an exemplar of the adage “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”. Sagan-1 is the first of two planets in the game’s campaign, which has a total of 8 main missions and six “Spec Ops” side-missions that are not required to complete the campaign. You are tasked with leading the troops retaking the mining planet of Sagan-1 using a collection of infantry and vehicles. Think of the Flood from Halo but with fewer pixels and some much larger creatures. Iron Marines is set in a far future where humanity has been attacked by an alien species called the Fell. So the question is can they make a good mobile RTS title? Looks like a nice place but its billions and billions of miles from anywhere. Ironhide is known for their Kingdom Rush line of tower defense titles which managed to bring some interesting gameplay elements and humour to what was becoming a very stale genre. Is it the grail RTS we’ve been waiting for? While these are all good games, none manage to create the same tension that desktop RTS titles are famous for.Īnd so, into this peculiar gaming niche comes Iron Marines from Ironhide Game Studio. RTS games that have succeeded on mobile– Rymdkapsel, Autumn Dynasty, and Alien Tribe 2 come to mind–do so by either reworking the concept of an RTS or creating new control schemes to simplify what’s possible with a keyboard and mouse. Not that people haven’t tried to reproduce the Command and Conquer or Starcraft experience, but the results have been less than spectacular. Sadly a phone or tablet doesn’t have the requisite number of easily accessible input devices to allow for standard RTS play. You don’t need to be Fred Allen to know that mobile Real Time Strategy games are seldom well-done.