Iron Danger Review – Test

Iron Danger – fancy tactical story RPG with time loops

Iron Danger is a tactical RPG in a fantasy world. It lets us play a heroine who not only masters magic, but also time travel. The game is released for PC, PS4, XBox, Linux, and Mac. In this review, you will be introduced to everything you need to know about Iron Danger, get a complete overview of all features & an analysis of the game.

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German Version:

This article is available here as text, but also as a YouTube video (German voice-over, many subtitles). This way you can choose how you would like to enjoy it most.

Video:

German voice-over, many subtitles

Iron Danger Review – Introduction – Release Date

Hi there, this is Zap. In this article, I would like to introduce the game Iron Danger, which is developed by the Action Squad Studios from Finland and published by the German publisher Daedalic Entertainment.

I want to show you what the game is about, how it looks like and how it is played. At the end, there is also a rating from me. But most of all I want to give you all the information so that you can decide if the game is something for you.

The game will be released on March 25th on Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux as well as PlayStation PS4 and Xbox. If a Nintendo Switch version is planned, I can’t answer 100% at the moment. But since there is no information about it at the moment, it is rather unlikely

I was provided with a free sample for this test, but this has no influence on my rating. I don’t even present terrible games and I try to write each rating as if I had paid the full price myself.

Story and Game type

Iron Danger is first and foremost an epic fantasy story. The girl Kipuna lives in a small fishing village, which is attacked by Norsemen and by an attack of the enemies in this attack, she is mortally wounded. She falls into a hole in the ground and is pierced by a rock.

Now, however, this was not a normal rock. But a special crystal, which has a connection to a being, which I don’t want to describe here in detail, in order not to spoil too much. But in the end, the crystal causes that she doesn’t die and gains a special ability to travel back in time the last 5 seconds, any time.

This gift is very confusing for the girl at the beginning but enables her not only to survive but also to solve extremely difficult tasks in the game by simply trying it out. And if it doesn’t work out, she simply rewinds time so far back that the mistake hasn’t happened yet. This way she can try out many ways and find the best way to solve a problem. And this is also the most important and interesting feature of this game.

The fact is, Iron Danger is actually an extremely difficult tactical role-playing game. If the time travel feature wouldn’t exist, the difficulty level would be ultra-difficult and probably very frustrating. But since you can try out everything with this Groundhog Day effect and undo your many, many deaths at any time, this opens up very special possibilities.

Beyond that, Iron Danger offers a fantasy role-playing game setting, with very tactical battles on complex maps, many skills and abilities, and a cool-down system.

Gameplay – Characters and progress

Our main heroine Kipuna does not travel alone. Mostly she is accompanied by the blacksmith of her home village called Topi. While Kipuna is more like a mage, this blacksmith is a real hitter and warrior. In the course of the story, other characters join in from time to time, some of whom you can take in place of Topi in certain missions. But there is always a maximum of only one two-person group.

Iron Danger is a role-playing game in the rough, but it does not have the classic RPG character sheets. So the characters have no basic values, no levels and there are no experience points. But there is still progress, in which we can also make decisions.

At least in the form that we can specify which skills we want to have upgraded first. After almost every mission, one of the characters is offered to choose one of the abilities we want to improve or learn from a list of skills.

Iron Danger puts the often RPG-typical value tinkering in the background and focuses more on storytelling and tactical combat. And there are plenty of both.

Gameplay – Combat, Skills, and Cooldowns

In Iron Danger, the fighting and general gameplay always take place with the camera at an angle from above, the so-called isometric perspective. The camera can be turned freely at any time and zooming in and out is possible within certain limits. Unfortunately, tilting the camera is not possible.

Basically there are two different game modes, the real-time mode and the so-called trance, which is a kind of turn-based strategy. These two states change partly automatically, but we can also switch at any time with the space key

In real-time we can walk around freely, look around, click everything, without any restrictions. If we get into a fight or switch to trance mode from our side, the time sequence is divided into heartbeats. At the bottom of the screen, these heartbeats are also displayed as an ECG curve.

Every heartbeat is one turn, and from now on the game will change to a turn-based strategy battle. Above the timeline, the two characters are displayed with their life energy, and next to them are the skills, spells, items and other commands that the currently selected character has available.

The selection on this bar starts with simple instructions like a slam, kick, sneak, wait, which each character has. It continues with special fighting skills.

Here Kipuna has some fire spells to choose from at the beginning, later there will be more. Blacksmith Topi has various strikes with his big hammer, a blocking skill or a taunting ability to get enemies to attack him for a while, classic aggro management. Then follow items from the inventory, such as food, traps, blaster barrels and the like, all of which can be used in combat.

All actions do not cost a special resource to use. So there is no mana or stamina to watch out for. The important resource here is, fitting to the game, time. Each action consumes time, which is indicated in the tooltips in heartbeats. In the same way, all abilities have cooldowns, meaning that if you have used them, it takes a while before they can be activated again.

Gameplay – Timeline and difficulty level

The outstanding feature of Iron Danger is the combination of time thread and difficulty of the game. If the game’s difficulty level would be so intense without the time feature, it would be just too hard and you would be dead and frustrated all the time.

Death is always in play, though. But because you can always turn back time, you can get a handle on these challenges by trying several times.

In the turn-based mode, you have this timeline or time thread, as the game calls it, at the bottom. If something happens to you in combat or in other situations, which you would rather not have happened, it is possible to undo it. You can then click on an earlier place on the bar, or more simply by pressing a hotkey, to turn back time to a point where the damage or mishap has not yet happened.

If you step into a trap like this, and there are many of them, you can easily avoid it in the second attempt. If you get a heavy hit in a fight, and this happens extremely often, you rewind a bit and try to evade it. Larger tactical contexts can be mastered much better with a little practice.

The game also offers some puzzles, where exactly coordinated actions are necessary. And so you can then go into the turn-based mode and match the two heroes exactly to each other’s heartbeats. And if it doesn’t work out, simply turn back the time and try again, and again, and again, and again, until it works.

In many fights, we can also use parts of the environment as help. Tallgrass for hiding, for example, or poisonous mushrooms that can be brought to an explosion. Or you can cut down rotten trees and let them fall on enemies, or move stacks of wood so that they roll over our enemies. Besides normal attacks and spells, there are often other interesting tactics to use.

Gameplay – Maps and Story

Iron Danger is map-based. This means the story is divided into chapters and stages, and each stage has its own map to explore and master.

Some parts of the main story come along without any fights and it’s just talking and the story is advanced. And sometimes a whole island or a whole dungeon is shown on a single map. Sometimes there were also little secrets to find, like books with recipes, or scrolls with poems.

The game will be saved at the end of each map and you can restart a map at any time if you want to. But to stop in the middle is rather unfavorable because you would lose the progress of this game session.

Most of the maps have a playing time between 10 and 40 minutes so that you should be able to play them all in one go. Of course, this also depends on how well you manage the tasks and how often you rewind to achieve the perfect sequence of events.

By the way, these parts are arranged linearly. You have to play through them one after the other, and when you have completed a mission, you can’t jump back there, except by loading the corresponding savegame and losing the total progress. So playing the same map again is possible immediately, but not later. The time travel mechanism does not go that far after all.

Engine, Graphics, Sound

With Unity, Iron Danger is based on a solid engine. Accordingly, stability and performance are no problem in this title.

The graphics of the game are comic-like and partly towards cute designed. But it is consistently on a very high level and also in good quality. Blurry textures are extremely rare, for example, and the maps are all very lovingly designed by hand.

The game features beautiful water animations, pretty grass, and handsome fire and ice effects. None of this is outstandingly better than other games, but it’s still very good-looking.

The game sounds are fitting and abundant. Actually almost everything makes some noise, even in the background, you can hear many high-quality samples. Behind them, there are fantasy music pieces, which were recorded with strings and similar orchestral instruments. The game has numerous titles, and I didn’t find any of them inappropriate or annoying, but on the contrary, some of them are even particularly beautiful.

The story is, with few exceptions, told with English voice output. For many other languages, there are high-quality subtitles. Almost all texts are displayed in boxes at the bottom of the screen, which you can click on to continue faster or if you wish, you can set the options so that the dialogues only continue when you click. So you can take your time reading subtitles.

With some texts, however, it is so unfavorably solved that some conversations are displayed in the 3D world, like speech bubbles above the characters’ heads. It happened to me that sometimes I had only one character on the screen, who suddenly displayed texts, and then I only had half of the conversation, because the other half took place somewhere outside the screen. But that was very rarely the case.

State of the Game

In more than 16 hours of testing, I never had a crash. There were no noticeable disturbing glitches, and this on a midrange system that has been around for a few years.

Also, other bugs, which are typical for such hand-designed cards, like getting stuck, bad accessibility of things or similar problems have not occurred to me. All skills and abilities have worked as desired as far as I could see.

In very rare cases, the pathfinding process was a little choppy or only partially comprehensible. Mostly this was because a ledge or an obstacle in the world was not well displayed and the character had to walk around it. But also here you can rewind with the time function some times and simply click a better way, problem solved.

To cut a long story short, Iron Danger is in a commendable technical condition. The quality assurance department has done a great job here and left hardly any reason to complain.

Screenshot Galerie

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

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Opinion and conclusion

Iron Danger is great fun, if you like tactics and planning turn-based strategy fights down to the last detail. Because of the time travel mechanism, this is also possible for not so experienced tacticians, maybe you have to rewind 2-3 times more, but with a little bit of trial and error, I was able to find a solution in every fight.

I really like the story of Iron Danger. It offers some surprises and twists and turns. It has many thrilling, but also some sad and grim moments. The story is easy to follow and the main characters also have some personality. Especially Kipuna has quickly become dear to my heart.

Since the game has a wide range of functions, the controls are correspondingly complex. But both the skill selection, like the control of the characters in the world and the extensive options of the time travel function are technically well implemented.

On the PC, all functions can be clicked with the mouse or directly triggered by hotkeys. All buttons are labeled with their shortcuts, the icons are well-designed, very exemplary. After a short acclimatization, I got along with it very easily. I can’t say anything about the gamepad controls now, but I think it should be easy to handle as well.

Depending on how you play, Iron Danger offers 10-20 hours of play, which brings the purchase price in the reasonable to acceptable range. For my taste, the game could offer another game mode or any other features that would provide replay value.

I am also a bit disappointed with the role-playing possibilities offered by Iron Danger. Here a lot more would have been possible, a small inventory system, some equipment, and maybe a few basic values for level-ups. And the game would have been even more appealing for RPG fans on the one hand and on the other hand, it might have resulted in increased replay value. Chances were missed here, which could have been implemented with relatively little effort.

In its present form, you play through the story once, which is also a totally good experience. But then a new run-through isn’t that exciting anymore, because there are only a few decisions, hardly any character-individualization and although the story is exciting and of high quality, it is also very linear. There is a lack of branching and real decisions, that would have been beneficial for the game.

Iron Danger Review – Rating

The small Finnish studio has delivered very high-quality work with Iron Danger. The game offers a great story, good turn-based strategy, a unique twist through the time travel mechanics, appealing graphics and good dubbing.

On the negative side, I noticed that despite having a German publisher only English voice output is available. Additionally, from my point of view, the omitted potential for role-playing and variations in the story should be criticized. Here a solid good game could have been made much better with only little effort.

If one compares the offered game fun with the price of the game, I would like to give a basic rating of 90%. But for a lack of replay value due to missed chances in RPG and story decisions, I deduct 5 %. This brings me to a final rating of 85 % for Iron Danger.

The developers are talking about updates after release, but I doubt that completely new features will be added to the game. Therefore, I don’t expect that much will change in this evaluation afterward. But I would still like to take a look at the patch notes.

Outro

Did you enjoy this overview of the journey of Kipuna and her associates? How do you like the time travel trick to find the best strategic solution for a battle or puzzle? I would appreciate your opinion in the comments. Subscribe and thumbs up at the YouTube video will make little testers happy. More reviews, guides, and game news are always available here at zapzockt.de – And then I wish you a great day, have a good time and stay healthy, ciao ciao, your zap

Links and Sources:

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Steam Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/899310/Iron_Danger

Game Website:
https://irondanger.com/

Game Twitter:
https://twitter.com/irondangerworld

Game Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/irondangerworld/

Game Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/iron_danger_world/

Dev Website:
https://actionsquadstudios.com/