Iron Danger

This game looks great in the trailer but the gameplay is very slow. There are turn-based games and then there's this, where you are constantly redoing all of your moves because your characters die in one hit. For a fantasy combat RPG kind of game we've got no gear, no looting, no exploration, no items hidden around corners, and a really poor and nearly useless journal system. I like the idea of the rewind mechanic, but I think it was implemented much better in a game like Fire Emblem Three Houses where it's there in case you mess up instead of something you have to use every heartbeat of every combat encounter. When fighting two grunt enemies takes 5 minutes, then your characters stop the game to have pointless dialogue about it, the gameplay loop is just not fun. It's less of a big deal to me, but the story also moves along at a weird, jumpy pace. No cutscenes, no opening, just instant cut from black screen to something happening. It's a DNF for me, I just left the island where you meet the healer, and even that was very abrupt. I went from doing a mission for her and her giving me a combat tutorial to leaving the island in an instant with no explanation or dialogue. The entire t…

I can see why this game is only $1.99 right now but honestly I overpaid. Pros: Voice acting is good, character design and graphics are great and it runs well even on max settings. Cons: absolute ♥♥♥♥ controls, confusing layout that just gets layered on itself in more cumbersome frustrating ways.

The key selling point of this game is its time manipulation mechanic, and while it's certainly unique for a strategy game, I don't think it's implemented well at all. Basically how it works is that you pause time to plan out your actions, then resume to see how they go or rewind when you make a mistake. Each action takes up a certain number of time units called "heartbeats." Since their duration is always discrete (e.g. an action can't take half a heartbeat), your characters can only move in 1 metre increments which makes melee combat quite awkward; enemies are often either slightly too far, or your character is inside them (yikes). Enemies may also change who or when they attack according to your moves which causes even more rewinding. Even seemingly unrelated actions like having my far away character move an extra metre can cause a crossbow guy to shoot a little later for some reason, causing me to redo my plans. It gets pretty tedious. Everything else about the game suffers from a lack of polish or depth, except the voice acting. A major gripe I have is that whenever dialogue plays, time completely stops. Very annoying given how much filler there is. Why can't I run around the …

I really wanted to like it, but there is too many problems due to a lack of polish and realistically not enough development time that it takes a really unique idea into a frustrating mess. The timeline mechanic where you can constantly go back and forth in time during combat for each character makes for endless strategies especially as you unlock more abilities. This is a the core of the game that you will be using the entire time, yet in combat its frustrating to use. I understand you cannot have a character do an action if they are currently in the middle of an attack animation, but once finished the timeline will skip all over the place from where you actually clicked and it takes a few clicks for the engine to realize what you want. What's even worse is you can swap characters to do actions while another is do an action but it ruins the flow as the timeline will go unpaused by a random amount of "heartbeats" (they call instead of frames) so you have to go back to wherever you were last. This happens every single time and there is no option in any of the menus to modify or stop this, if i rewind as the player i want it to because i made a mistake or came up with an idea, not cu…

Concept seemed innovative but I never felt the *cool* here. I tried it for a bit but gave up.

i'm gonna recommend it, but probably on sale. i really like the core idea here, it's a really unique mechanic that seems to have a lot of potential. and the quality of the game is very high, clearly a lot of polish and craft here. but i'm over 1 hour in, and it's already feeling tedious? the combat doesn't really seem to go anywhere, i'm just using the same old tactics to fight a ton of bandits. maybe it gets better later, but with so many games in my backlog, i'm not sure i'm gonna stick around to find out. but still, if you can get this on sale for under $10, i think it's worth experiencing for the unique mechanic alone. similar vibes to games like frozen synapse, ready or not, etc. where you get to really perfect your plan.