Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The Case for Doublefine's Iron Brigade!

I really admire Tim Schafer. Maybe it’s for making Monkey Island, which was a pretty important game in my life. Maybe it’s for his raw, unconcerned weirdness, which seems to inform everything he does. Maybe it’s because he pursues ideas, regardless of their marketability, making games that blur the lines of genre and never cease to impress. Maybe it’s that there’s so much going on in everything he works on: layers upon layers at work in games that, even on their surface, are at times frighteningly complex.

My point is that, when I see that Schafer has made a game, I want to play it. I want to play it over a long, comfortable weekend without distractions, without any other games in my life getting between us. That’s how I played through Brutal Legend over the course of a few weeks, that’s how I made my way through Psychonauts, and that’s more or less what I’m doing with his latest creation, a distinct Schaferism on the genre of Tower Defense, Iron Brigade.

I could gush on its humor (which is present, tongue in cheek and family friendly and filthy all in one bundle, and wonderfully witty, of course) or its art design (a marvelous blend of realism and the sort of cartoonish hyperrealism that Team Fortress 2 uses so effectively, set in a fictional time period which is simultaneously historically astutely and totally, lovingly irreverently nestled between World War I and II) or any number of other things (long parenthetical statement here). But that’s all window dressing in the Tower Defense genre. The meat of the genre is, as always, the towers. And the defending. The play, that is.

And that’s here. It’s here in spades.

See, Tower Defense games are curious beasts. They are, at their most fundamental level, formulaic games. They’re supposed to have solid learning curves followed by sharply increasing difficulty levels. They can be really, really simple (like Desktop Tower Defense, which is both visually and mechanically a really simple game that delivers marvelously on the promise of Tower Defense play) or surprisingly complicated (like Defense Grid, which has a pretty intense, rapidly shifting puzzle mechanic and a lot of moving pieces which can quickly overwhelm new or inattentive players). Tower Defense games are diverse while retaining some universal core conceits, and the manner in which those conceits are explored forms the fundamental crux of these games. The simplicity or complexity of the game, paired with its visual aesthetic, usually constitutes its appeal: a good Tower Defense game means different things to different people, but it’s always about defending something from enemies using towers.

Iron Brigade mixes this up in a couple of ways. First and foremost, you’re controlling a giant walking Trench (mech) that, while it builds things, doesn’t JUST build things. In fact, certain varieties of mech (Trench) won’t build very many things at all. They’ll lean more towards shooting things, which is a core part of Iron Brigade’s impressively frenetic tower defenses. Taking a note from Dungeon Defenders and Orcs Must Die, Iron Brigade mixes some solid third person shooting/smashing in with a lot of building and collecting. The balance is impressive, and, like in Dungeon Defender, you can shift it by selecting a different sort of “class” or ability prior to the start of the battle.

But unlike Dungeon Defender, there’s a shared progression guiding the game in the form of a vast equipment pool and a slow leveling system that doles out access to said equipment. Dungeon Defender’s class based progression system means that people who want to rely on towers will always have to rely on towers and people who want to fight enemies up close and personal will always have to be in their foe’s faces fucking shit up, since progression is always tied to a single class type. Iron Brigade, on the other hand, wants players to get in and test out all of the little toys it hands out, offering recommendations as to just what you should be doing when, giving out loot at random and letting you change between chassis, weapon loadouts and turret loadouts without any restriction spare level and the distribution of available equipment slots on a given chassis.

The end result is a smart, effective progression system gated by a universal equipment pool and a universal pool of money that lets you play however you like and then shift your style dramatically if the mood strikes you. I spent the first four or five missions playing with a combat oriented chassis, mostly ignoring building turrets until a particularly grueling mission recommended that I mix anti-air and long range turret components together in a way that only an engineering oriented chassis could. I slipped into the engineering chassis and traded my long range artillery cannon and impressive multi-machine gun array for a quaint little automatic sniper rifle and proceeded to joyfully watch my turrets shred enemies every bit as well as my guns had been doing previously.

That means that the core Tower Defense play, solidly executed in a fast paced third person fashion paralleled in the titles I mentioned previously (but aesthetically most similar to Sacrifice and Schaefer’s own Brutal Legend, a pair of underappreciated gems with unconventional interfaces) is all there, paired with a combat system that never feels anemic from any approach. I could gush over the specifics, but I don’t want to get that detailed here: there’s so much going on in Iron Brigade’s sleek, intelligently composed package that if I did get into the nitty gritty of customization and play, I’d be going on all day. Suffice it to say, it’s robust and it’s sustained itself longer than most Tower Defense games in my collection have quite handily, passing six hours of play without any sign of it getting old (I burn out on Tower Defense quick). The play, while engaging, isn’t grueling, and varied map designs with complicated approach mechanics and objectives play with the idea of static defense points in ways to make each map a distinct experience, worthy of replay from a new perspective or in an attempt to nudge your score up just a few…more…points.

But the real digression from the Tower Defense formula comes from the boss fights: combats that pit you and your mech against one big boss (who usually fights in phases) and a slurry of tiny enemies hellbent on wrecking your day. These fights have more a puzzle flair (true to Doublefine’s design chops) than the rest of the game, but it’s a good kind of puzzling feeling. The fights are frenetic, full of visual cues, swirling chaos and generously light consequences for failure. Even though I’ve replayed one of them multiple times during my brief affair with Iron Brigade, I haven’t been overly frustrated by my various failures. They tend to make the game feel more like a learning experience than a chore, a testament to both the variety of play options contained within it and the dramatically varying bonus victory conditions (good luck getting gold on every map alone).

Along with a co-op feature I’m itching to try out and all of those wonderful non-game features that I mentioned before (the puns are so spot on and the writing so cheerfully drab that I find myself smiling every time I hear my iron-lunged commanding officer speak), Iron Brigade is well worth the fifteen dollar price tag. I’m not sure it’s the revolutionary achievement that other Doublefine games have been in the past. I think co-op might reveal whether or not this is going to be something earth shattering, like Psychonauts, or something that burns bright for a few of us and fades away, like Brutal Legend. It’s being presented as a very prominent element of the game, with a four-pack on sale through Steam and its own little section on the main menu/deck of the ship, with equal face time alongside “Trench” customization and mission briefing sub-menus. I plan to engross myself in it as soon as I finish the game proper, and I’m already playing through maps wishing I had friends to help me cover various approaches.

But for now, even without that seemingly crucial aspect of play invoked, I’m having a blast (PUN!) with Iron Brigade. It’s gotten me to stop playing for most of a day, which is no mean feat. Hilarious hats off to you, Doublefine.