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Experienced gamers might find too many faults, but younger gamers may find this game to be just what they need.

I plead guilty to enjoying war games, including those of the first person shooter type. I also plead guilty to having a strong preference for war games based on real historical wars. Anything from the Crusades to Desert Storm has the potential to grab my attention. For this reason, the otherwise superb game Operation Flashpoint, which was based on a fictional conflict, a sort of “what if” scenario, was not interesting to me. I just couldn’t get into the fictional story.

Iron Storm, published by DreamCatcher and under development by 4X Studios, is one of those fictional, what if scenarios that make it especially challenging for a reality gamer like me to suspend disbelief. Nevertheless, I installed the beta and gave it the old school try.

The publisher openly admits that Iron Storm “takes place in an imaginary environment inspired by 20th Century warfare.” What exactly does that mean? Well, perhaps the best analogy would be a survey combat flight sim that covers more than one era or war.

Rather than concentrating on the equipment and technology utilized in one war, Iron Storm incorporates the weaponry of the two world wars fought in the 20th Century and then tosses in modern warfare technology. So the trenches, mines and barbed wire fences of World War I, the tanks, grenades and flame throwers of World War II, and the lasers and helicopters of modern warfare are all thrown into the mix and included in the game play.

The precise setting for Iron Storm is this: WWI never ended and has been raging for 50 years, since August 1914 (there has been so much fighting Domino’s Pizza refuses to deliver anywhere). The good guys are described as “Occidentals and Americans.” The bad guys are led by some kind of Ghengis Khan/Napoleon figure who is described in the game as a “megalomaniac.” Mr. Megalomaniac’s real name is even scarier: Baron Von Ugenberg.

Anyway, like in a James Bond movie, von Ugenberg is hell bent on bending the entire world to his will. He’s The Big Dog or at least wants to be, so the rest of us have to do something to stop him. For fifty years no one has been able to squash him. This is where you come in. Lead the good guys against von Ugenberg and make the world safe again for Dominos Pizza delivery people.

If the beta is representative of the final version, the gamer does not have very many options. Unless you want to do multiplayer, there is campaign mode to select and there is… well, campaign mode. No single player missions; no “instant action.” And there is only one campaign.

The campaign starts in the bowels of a dark and bleak headquarters somewhere amidst a dark and bleak battlefield in Central Germany. The whole exterior setting looks like I remember old movies of the battlefields in France during WWI. Trenches are everywhere, as are modern day helicopters that seem to fly rather predictable patterns constantly over your head no matter where you go.

At headquarters you pick up information from the other good guys about what you are supposed to do. To get them to talk, you walk up close to them. This got a little boring for me, so I pulled my pistol and popped my fellow soldier in the right eye. All the other good guys turned on me and filled me full of lead. Most disturbing was seeing the good guy I’d traitorously killed rise from the dead and empty her weapon into me, too.

Bored with battling my own people, I ventured out into the labyrinth of trenches to find the war. Before I found the war, I found a kennel full of attack dogs. Just to see what would happen, I opened the cages and walked into their kennels. For whatever reasons the dogs didn’t like me, forcing me to pull my knife and… well, you can figure out the rest. Several Fido burgers later, I was wandering again through the trenches and encountered a bright young soldier who took it upon himself to guide me to the front lines.

I had a sniper rifle that I must’ve acquired somewhere in my wanderings around the trench headquarters, so the bright young soldier – clearly my subordinate - decided to tell me what to do with it. My first mission was to take out two troublesome snipers nobody could locate. Crouching, I was able to find one of them fairly quickly and put one in the back of his head. My rifle was equipped with a scope and a laser, which was neat and made it nearly impossible to miss.

All the time I’m looking for and terminating the sniper the war is raging around me. Explosions are everywhere. You see dirt and debris flying into the air. The thunderous booms of detonating bombs and the rat-a-tat-tat of machine gun fire never ceases. So good are the effects at making you feel you’re in a war zone that explosions nearby even make the screen shake. Nice.

In Iron Storm, I continued to hunt snipers and go on more missions until I got killed. Fortunately, there is a “quick save” feature that allows you to start again at the last point you saved rather than back at the very beginning.

While the sound effects in Iron Storm are exceptional, the graphics are second rate. It’s not that they aren’t clear, but they have “budget title” written all over them.

Iron Storm does not really light my fire. The game play was not all that exciting even though the war environment is around you, and the sights and little interactions with other characters was convincing.

Some people, however, will like Iron Storm. The demo is one of the top downloads on at PC Gameworld. And I suspect it will be priced (ahem) very competitively, making it even easier to swallow. But Iron Storm lacks the realistic game play of some other military shooters based on what if scenarios, including the stellar Operation Flashpoint.

I think die-hard fans of the Rainbow Six - Rogue Spear - Ghost Recon series will find too many faults with Iron Storm, but younger gamers may find it to be just what they need to kill a really boring weekend.

Preview by Walter Hurdle.