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I began the game hoping for the best. Even after being presented with appallingly terrible graphics in the first scenario I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt. With totally unimpressive appearance it reminded me of the first time I played Operation Flashpoint. I remembered that sometimes good gameplay can outweigh poor graphics; I proceeded on keeping an optimistic mindset… for as long as I could. Hurdle after hurdle presented itself and I tried over and over to stay on an upbeat path. My patience turned to frustration as I waited and waited for the tutorial to kick in. It never did.



The “simulator” simulated combat all right, combating the urge to throw the disc across the room in frustration. Iron Warriors was one of the hardest games I’ve ever had the ordeal of trying to learn. Not because I do not grasp the high learning curve of a simulator, but because its ‘tutorial’ was totally uninformative (the manual teaches almost nothing).

What was supposed to be a tutorial plops you into a tank with almost no direction of what to do next, no way to know where your waypoints are, and almost no actual goal or way of tracking it if you had one. You are dropped instantly into combat, and if you don’t have the foresight to write down your key designations before beginning a mission you have to manually leave the game to re-check them in the options menu and then start over again.



Opening the map presents a multitude of options, all of which seem to have no bearing on gameplay. You can yell “Stop, Go, Scan, Fire, Hold Fire, etc” but the game responds differently depending on its current mood like some naggy old high school girlfriend. Sometimes the guns will fire with incredible accuracy, instantly killing its target from distances never thought possible. Or it might decide to spin around endlessly until you take the controls of the giant gun yourself only to do the exact same thing. If you happen to lose the target in the viewfinder, good luck finding it again. I almost threw up after one such event. I’ve never been a sufferer of vertigo, but on this day in the Bosnian Mountains this wicked disease almost claimed another victim.