This is perhaps the most infuriating game I have ever played and I would have binned it after the first hour if it was not for, well what? I'm not sure. Let me explain.
The start of the game is a tutorial where you are shown how to select, fire and reload guns, hand grenades and panzerschrecks. This is all well and good except it takes forever to get from one shooting range to another because of the banal and unnecessary chatter of the officer in charge. Still no matter, sticking with it you eventually get to fire at some baddies - in this case communists but if you choose the Soviet campaign you can shoot Nazis instead.
The campaign choice is interesting as there are 2 campaigns, Russian and German which you can play in German (with English sub-titles) or English. Here is the first obstacle. Because it takes sooooo long to get anything done in the tutorial, and the game come to that, there is a disincentive to go back and choose a different campaign, or even to a previous save point. If you choose German but don't speak it then it is very easy to miss an instruction and then be totally perplexed as to what to do as the subtitles vanish - like an old oak table. At one point I was on the shooting range and there were no targets left to shoot. The Officer was in his observation hide and there was no indication that a check point had been reached. And that was it - nothing happened - so I shot the officer. Big mistake. The next scene was my soldier being executed (which took forever too) and it was back to the start of the tutorial! That'll teach me.
As there is no real help in game as to what to do next, except for the occasional cryptic message in the map tasks screen, doing stuff is often a case of trial and error. Believe me when I say trial and error is correct phrase as this game is loaded with a level of buggy play that shouldn't have got it out of alpha testing never mind into the public's sweaty hands. The number of times things just goes tonto for no reason is astonishing.
A good example has been mentioned in a previous review - the moving of the PAK anti-tank gun. Now, as the reviewer stated, you are told to move the gun but not how to actually do it. I tried a number of methods including stealing vehicles and trying to hitch the gun to one - after all you are told to unhitch it first. It was after a good long while and some angry surfing that I discovered the method outlined in the review on Amazon. The next problem is that the solution only works if you have the right patch loaded (1.6 works fine -ish) - the vanilla version is impossible to play as you cannot get the option to sit in the gun to progress past this point. How this passed testing is beyond me as it is the first act in the first scene of the game! How did they miss such an obvious bug?
So one patch later and ...
The graphics are good and the maps are just cool. They are Stalker huge and the developers have really thought about game play with the placement of cover (or lack of it), buildings and the like. It's sort of impressive too the way planes blow up but when a flight of German bombers passing overhead suddenly nose dive into the ground and blow up you do start to wonder at the madness of war. Actually you don't. You just start feeling that this is a really badly coded engine. Did I mention that the game was buggy?
Which brings us to the next problem. Realism. This game is sold on its hyper-realism. It's more a WW2 sim than a straight forward shooter. Which is fine but it does take a lot of the 'fun' aspects out of the game and becomes a much more serious proposition. No more charging grenades and MP40 in hand at Ivan oh no. Stick your neck out and expect to be shot. Dead. No reprieve. Followed by another length unskippable cut scene where you are driven for 5 minutes by a drunk (the vehicle bot pathfinding is ludicrous at times) back to the point where you are instantly shot because you didn't dive for cover fast enough.
The realism aspect goes as far as replenishing ammo for the panzerschrek by hunting down ammo boxes, kneeling next to one selecting the right option, changing guns, loading up and been run over by the T34 that was miles away but caught up with you whilst you were messing around with the ammo box. This would be OK if it wasn't for the bugginess of the whole game. Sometimes the right options just don't show up and you end up switching guns over and over instead of opening the ammo box. It's not realism, it's annoying. The controls are too imprecise for something that requires 'realistic' options to be selected and the number of times the world has swirled and I ended up looking at clouds when I thought I'd selected a different gun is legion. It's down to sloppy coding really. Or, more likely, this game has been rushed out before it was ready. But, hey at least that isn't an industry wide problem ...
So I'm giving this 2 stars as I'm starting to like it in a perverse sort of way - until the next bug laden annoyance comes along. It's a shame because this ruins what could be an otherwise good game. If you are tempted to buy this game wait for a few more patches to be released and you might be pleasantly suprised.
Iron-Front - Liberation 1944 (PC DVD)
Platform :
Windows Vista,
Windows XP
Rated:
Ages 18 and Over
- Huge battles involving infantry, tanks and aircraft, all of which are realistically recreated.
- Authentic arms such as the Mauser Karabiner 98k rifle, MP40 machine guns, grenades and more.
- More than 40 land vehicles and aircrafts are available, including JS-2 and Tiger II tanks, , and many more!
- Challenging Multiplayer: Players can either complete missions cooperatively or with friends.
- Mission Editor: With the intuitive and extensive mission editor players can create their own missions and share them with friends online.
Product details
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Product description
Iron Front is set in Southern Poland during the Soviet Offensive in the summer of that year. The player takes on the role of a Russian or German infantryman, using teamwork, tactical skill and authentic war machines to battle for victory.Each campaign features eight missions. However, the player does not have to do all this on foot: Using their computers, tacticians will control tanks, including the famous German battle tank Panzerkampfwagen and the Russian Stalin tank JS2, or fighter planes such as the Focke Wulf 190 and dive bombers like the Stuka.Online is where the battle really heats up. Players can either complete missions cooperatively or compete with each other in special multiplayer modes such as "Capture the Flag" or "Attack and Defence".
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 June 2012
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 25 January 2013
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 24 July 2012
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Top international reviews
Björn Meier
Multilanguage, alles super! Nicht gebraucht kaufen!!!
Reviewed in Germany on 4 February 2013Verified Purchase