Iron Marines Invasion is a real-time action strategy game all about battle-hardened marines from space (not to be confused with space marines) engaging in battles across the galaxy. While toting a great art style and ambitiously designing a galaxy full of aliens, the presentation might be the only spot this game excels in. This title has a lot of places I’d like to see it improve before I can say it’s worth its 15-dollar price tag.
Before getting into anything else, I will once again compliment Iron Marines Invasion on its fantastic art direction. The game is presented in a colorful 2d art style that brings every character to life as they fight on the battlefield. The cartoony but violent nature of the galaxy gives the game a ton of identity, and goes really far in making the title stand out.
Character designs are for the most part really good, though it can be hit or miss. Some units and heroes are incredibly iconic, with the default marine faction being a good example of this. Others are a little more forgettable; I particularly didn’t latch on to any of the designs of the villain factions I encountered during my campaign.
The game has an expansive cast of characters and units, which is where its mostly strong character design really shines. Not only are there several factions of enemies, but you have a ton of allied factions to choose from when setting up your roster before a mission. These factions all have unique unit types and styles, making them stand out visually from the others in a mission. My favorites were the rail-gun mech and, of course, the Cathros.
In addition to these units, you also bring in a hero into each mission you complete. Heroes take a bit longer to unlock and are just as unique as the many factions of basic units. While they have their strengths and weaknesses, their general advantage over the standard troop means you’re fine with just bringing in your favorite character.
Actually getting into the gameplay, your standard mission involves pretty straightforward RTS gameplay. The Dawn of War series is a good comparison if you’ve played it. You start with a base and a few units and you need to capture nodes to produce resources and build more units. Unlike many other RTS games I’ve played, you begin the missions with a unit cap of 1 and must explore the map to increase it further, collecting special resource tokens scattered about.
Starting with only one unit is kind of a bummer, but when you realize how short these missions are it starts to make sense. Most missions involve you battling your way to a certain location and clearing it of enemies, which doesn’t usually take longer than five to ten minutes. After a successful mission, you’re given a little comic page showing what comes next in your quest to bring peace to the galaxy. While cool, these usually don’t have more than a sentence of dialogue, and saying the game has a big story would be an exaggeration.
You take three factions of units into a mission, each with varying costs and three unique types of soldiers. While you’re limited in how many you can have at a time, you can switch a unit to a different one at the push of a button, allowing for some interesting strategy. Units fully heal and even recover lost units when sitting still for long enough.
While the unit variety is cool, most of the battles are pretty simple. There is no strategic diversity in the gameplay beyond having different types of units sit there and shoot at each other, hoping that yours has the right stats to have an advantage over the others. Usually, you’re greatly outnumbered, so picking the right units to have a firearm advantage is an important, if difficult to understand task.
It’s kind of like taking the same mission and playing it over and over again. Eventually, you’ll get bored. While the maps of each mission are different, they’re fairly small so the variety isn’t something you really feel very much.
A huge problem this game has is that everything functions on a 2D plane. It doesn’t seem like a big deal at first until you have enemies who become non-targetable because they stepped behind a building. I’ve lost plenty of units waiting for their auto fire to kick in on the high-value target I could no longer right-click.
Completing a mission gives you some currency and unlocks new units, heroes, or points to be spent on upgrades. The game says it has roguelike elements, but everything seemed to be upgraded linearly for me, so I’m confused as to where these roguelike elements were. Upgrade points from missions more or less go to straightforward statistic upgrades, like more line of sight or damage.
Using coins from missions, you can purchase special ordinances to take into your next battles. These are fun and satisfying to drop on your foes, with the missle rain being especially useful. While sometimes the targeting can be a bit wonky, I didn’t have a lot of trouble using these. Although you should definitely be able to drop them outside of your line of sight, or at least on the edges of vision where I can still see my enemies but can’t target them for some reason.
Overall, I’d say the game needs some work. The RTS battles could be great with the unit variety, but being limited to such small squads sort of limits the potential. Some more mechanics, like cover, formations, special abilities, etc could be added to units to make battles more distinct. Mission variety is very important too, because outside of some boss fights you’re really playing the same five-minute skirmish repeatedly.
Many of these problems become understandable when you realize Iron Marines Invasion is the port of a mobile game, and for a mobile game, it’s fine. Still, for a $15 port of a $3 mobile game, Iron Marines Invasion certainly doesn’t live up to its potential.
The Final Word
Though rich in unit and character variety and full of phenomenal art, Iron Marine Invasion doesn’t deliver so well on the gameplay aspect. While certainly not the worst RTS on the market, the game could use a few improvements and expansions on its combat before I would consider it living up to its full potential.
6
Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Iron Marines Invasion is available on Steam.