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Iron Storm is a first-person shooter set in an alternate timeline where the Great War never ended. While WWII is a hot topic, few titles, even in wargames, have touched upon the subject of WWI. It's a difficult subject matter. The last successful cavalry charge took place here but it was also the site of new battle tactics and ideology in warfare. Gone were the aristocratic generals where war was a pastime and in came the tanks, trenches, gas and other inventions of modernity. Iron Storm is a dialectic mix of WWI and the technology that was pioneered based on those principles for an ongoing five decades.
 
Taking place in 1964, war has degraded everything in Europe to a grimy rusted out iron pulp. In this setting, you take on the role of a commando sniper, Lieutenant James Anderson, into a typical buddy-action story. You're aided by a female operative who sits behind the lines as she guides you through your mission to stop the Russian Mongols (Russians who beat the Bolshevik Revolution back and decided to use the Mongol name in light of Genghis Khan) from devising a secret superweapon to throw the war's advantage to their side. But, your superiors tell you, it's not so much that the world will be destroyed-it's how much they will eventually profit from selling this weapon that scares the upper brass most. And in the meantime, they didn't bother mentioning you'll have to wade solo through trenches, factories and bombed out towns to achieve your ultimate objective.  
First-person shooters are quickly bifurcating themselves into the heavily scripted ones and other titles that privilege free-thinking AI and free-floating objectives. Iron Storm is of the former, similar to Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in the sense that constituents of the Iron Storm world are either doomed to die or they are written to help. This gives Iron Storm a cinematic feel as you make your way through the gritty action. In the beginning, you'll get lots of scripted help from friendly AI soldiers who'll try to clear the way for you and lay down cover fire. However, by the time you get deep into Russian territory, to take a quotation from last year's most prolific first-person shooter, you'll find out you're your own best help.  
Your female partner, as typical of all buddy-based games, usually has a plan for you to get from point A to B. She's in constant communication about it but ends up constantly communicating about deviations from the plan. One of the biggest lessons taught by WWI was the fact that people planning from behind had absolutely no idea of what happened at the front. They would set rally points at places and landmarks that no longer existed on the front. That detachment is certainly what gets you in trouble as your path from point A to point B takes you towards a half dozen scenic routes that are laced heavily with obstacles, generally making your life all the more difficult. Some moments will require you to sneak around undetected while others will force you to blast away at Russian soldiers. Against superior numerical odds, stealth is preferred over action but Iron Storm is flexible enough to let you blast away at everything.  
The encounters themselves are enjoyable, with in-game story sequences and communiqué to flesh out the background of the war. It is the premise and feel of the world that attracted me to the most. Iron Storm's makeup is like WWI mentality on steroids. Tanks and guns are built on WWI models, only they're augmented with modern advancements. On the other hand, WWI mentality thinking, like reckless infantry tactics of going over the top, is still preferred. In the case of armored vehicles, that means bulking APCs and tanks with more armor. Anyone who has seen a British WWI tank will know how unwieldy those units can be. Helicopters, experiments during WWI, are found in abundance to counteract trench warfare and much of the first level alone takes place in confined claustrophobic trenches as you crisscross the frontlines. Even the weapons themselves mirror a WWI mentality. You're actually issued a melee weapon in the form of a saber; a weapon of privilege to officers in the old 19th century military. While your pistol may have a silencer, your machine gun looks more like a retrofitted Maxim gun; big and bulky.
 
Those subtle points, along with the restless war story, turn Iron Storm into an intriguing alternate universe. It's like those novels that talk about the never-ending Civil War in America. The 1964 also reminded me of a similar alternate universe: a television movie called Fatherland where the Nazis retained Europe, Joseph Kennedy is the president and Stalin and Hitler continue to wage their war until modern times. This game works along the same principles. All the curiosity of what ifs begin to appear and from what Iron Storm looks like now, a good deal of them are touched upon. Still a little rough around the edges, Iron Storm has enough conviction to sweep you away into its universe and has the visuals to help convey a world wrought with decay and attrition. Mix in some first person shooting and sneaking and you have Cold War combatants going hot.
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