Iron Grip: Warlord and the Scorched Earth DLC was purchased via a game bundle. It's a mix of Tower Defence and a FPS. Primarily a Multi-Player game, it does come with a skirmish mode.

When I went to try it out, there were 17 servers running all with a grand total of zero players and pings I've not seen since the 1990s. Since Nobody else I know had it installed, this F86M just covers the skirmish/Single-Player.

There's some story/lore to this game, but to be honest I could not be arsed to be interested. Basically there are two rival factions, and one wants to kill the other. The aim of the game? Damage the enemy moral until their launch an air-strike and kill you so that others will rally to your cause. Totally Stupid.

Thankfully the game is rather decent and makes up for it. There's nothing in the way of character customisation aside from choosing a base model and a name. I went with the tubby iron guy.

Jumping into the game you choose a map and difficulty and are presented with a short text & pictures tutorial that tells you the very basics, then are let loose on the game world. That's it. I don't know if LAN/Internet work any differently but there appeared to be the usual votes & kicks seen in such games.

Visually the world looks decent enough to me for a game from 2008 or so. It is very muddy and brown, but the textures are clear enough and there was not anything visually appalling to it.

Unfortunately the UI when selecting drops is very unclear, even after the play time allotted for this I still had to mouse over or remember by location what something was.

Enemy design for the troops is also rather samey, and at a distance it can be hard to tell what something is. There is a lot of close combat however and when something is under 20 metres away you can see what they are wielding. I did like the tank/mech designs used, while not the most creative they had some style to them.

So the gameplay itself? You have to defend oncoming waves until you score enough moral points on the enemy. It plays like any other FPS game, but I only came across three different guns. Two of which are defaults and have slow reloads and fire rates, the rifle is powerful but one shot to reload and the rate it runs at makes it challenging.

You are given a Wrench to repair drops and your base, and a knife for close combat kills. Other pickups include Molotovs and Dynamite. Your character can barely throw however and there's a lot of back peddling to use them effectivly.

Enemies however fire at minigun speeds all the time and it makes the game feel unfair.

You can also hit a key and move into tower mode, this changes the camera to top-down and allows you to place turrets, traps, healing/ammo points and so on. There's a little bit of strategy in placing items at the right places but most of the limitations came from where you got a green 'OK' to place symbol, rather than the credits you can use to place.
Credits increase over time and on enemy kills. It's possible to just run around for several minutes and rack up a huge amount then drop items over huge stretches of the map.

Some drops work better against certain enemies, and while there is only 6 or so usable drops, it was enough variety for playing. The game has enough periods where the action dies down enough to place too so you don't get swamped.

Unfortunately due to a dead MP mode the game quickly gets boring in Skirmish. If you can find a few people willing to play online or over a LAN, and have lower expectations you may get something out of this.

But the game is marred by various non technical issues and simply is not a lot of fun for people outside the core audience who like this mash of genres.

Game Acquisition: Purchased on Sale (Bundle Stars)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Thread: 1 - 25 March 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009

OS: Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7
Processor: Pentium 4 2.0 GHz or Athlon XP 2000+
Memory: 512 MB of available system memory
Hard Drive: 550 MB of available hard drive space
Graphics: 128 MB OpenGL compatible Video Card (FX 5200 or Radeon 8500 or better)
Sound: DirectX Compatible Soundcard \\