
VD-dev tries to throw every cliche in the book of generic shooters at players, but I can’t even remember the names of the characters five minutes after putting the game down, which shows how committed I was to the plot of this thing. One moment you’re blasting away with the hulking all-American hulk with all the toys, then the next you’re in control of a woman working her way through a darkened hotel room with a flashlight and a peashooter of a pistol. There are multiple characters, and the narrative chops between them as they work together to overcome the alien threat. And for all VD-dev’s ability with the technical side of game development, the moment I entered a large room I would start to notice the pop-in of environmental elements.ĭespite that pop-in, the game tries hard to offer a dynamic, cinematic experience. It’s a rare feat that I’m bored of an environment the very first time I play a game, but that happened on multiple occasions this time. There’s little real effort in creating environments that move from one to another seamlessly – your hero will leave a warehouse environment, walk down a corridor and emerge in a literal forest, for just one example – and while these levels offer the requisite places to to take cover to combat the enemies, they’re so sterile in execution that they’re painful to play through and experience. The same linear progression system that is in almost every shooter where players will make their way down a corridor, emerge into a large room and have to fight a horde of enemies, applies here.
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It’s like the team at VD-dev purchased a book on how to build shooter levels and copied it wholesale.

The level design is every bit as uninspired as the enemies. With cover-based shooter it’s important that the AI is at least capable of basic strategic thinking that it can flank positions and remain aware of player movement, but here I had figured out how to exploit the lack of AI within the first hour, and while later enemies were tougher or introduced specific abilities that I needed to compensate for, the basic strategies to overcome the hordes of them never changed from start to finish. But in IronFall the aliens more closely resemble generic robot things, and the most dull AI I’ve seen in a game in some time doesn’t help things. The concept of having a small team of hardened soldiers taking on an army of aliens is a common one, and a timeless enough theme that, provided it’s executed well, no one will ever complain about.

This, too, is typical of VD-dev games they’re always superb tech demos, but they are never great games. IronFall Invasion quickly reveals itself to be a painfully shallow and generic shooter, hampered as much from a lack of creativity and inspiration by the developers as it is by hardware that is simply not up to the precision that the genre demands. Sadly, that initial wow factor doesn’t take long to wear off. The immediate impression of the game is really that simple – Nintendo has finally found itself a premier shooter to highlight the new dual-stick capabilities of the New Nintendo 3DS that the C-stick enables.

Chunky character models that wouldn’t look out of place in a Gears of War title, and moving around in a slick behind-the-shoulder 3rd person action game – something that is a real rarity on the Nintendo 3DS – is certainly something that people have wanted on the handheld for quite some time, especially when you throw in multiplayer online action.

So it isn’t surprising that the team’s first Nintendo 3DS title is immediately appealing from a technical point of view.
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Then, on the 3DS, it took a crack at a full GTA-style open world game with Cop: The Recruit. It produced a two full 3D games on the Game Boy Advance (Driv3r and Asterisx and Obelix XXL) a console that was really no more powerful than a Super Nintendo. VD-dev is a small, Nintendo handheld specialist developer that has a history of making games that really push whatever hardware it is working on to its limits.
