Iron Front: Liberation 1944 review (PC)

As if the technical issues weren't enough, it becomes immediately clear when you begin a real mission that Iron Front is completely overwhelmed with feature creep. All sorts of small arms are, ostensibly, realistically modeled, along with vehicles, heavy weapons, airplanes, you name it. But the game tries to cram realistic performance for all of these things into its limited controls, creating a morass of impenetrable key bindings that are impossible to memorize and even harder to implement when someone is shooting at you. Why, for example, is there a separate key for "stand up"? Why can't you simply hit the "crouch" or "prone" button again? Conversely, double-tapping the forward button to sprint is extremely clumsy, especially since your sprinting speed is so similar to your normal movement speed that it's hard to tell at times if you've even started sprinting successfully.

You've just started a scenario mission. What are you supposed to do? Who knows!

Let's say you manage to look past all this and struggle through Iron Front's interminable tutorial levels to get to actual missions; you only have complete chaos to look forward to, because enemy AI is completely moronic, allies are useless, and death will randomly hit you with no warning whatsoever. You might be walking along a friendly runway in your HQ during the first 10 seconds of a mission, about to climb into the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf 190, only to be summarily laid out by God knows what in the middle of your own base. Was it an enemy bomber? A piece of shrapnel? Friendly fire? A sniper? It doesn't really matter--have fun looking at another loading screen while the entire mission resets.

Multiplayer offers little respite, although at least you don't have to deal with much in the way of AI idiocy. Still, almost all players of Iron Front appear to be located in Europe, so pings from the US, particularly the Western US, are absolutely awful. If you do get into a decent game, you better know how to speak German, because the guys you're playing with most likely do. But don't worry, you won't have to listen to them for too long--games crash, lag out, or unceremoniously kick you out on a regular basis. On the rare occasion you do get to play through a match, you spend most of your time sneaking about, encountering nary an enemy, and getting totally owned by someone you never see.

Floating tooltips try to offer guidance, but the key bindings make no sense, and it's hard to read them in the middle of getting shot at.

Alternatively, you're on the other side of this: you creep up on some poor soul who has no idea what's going on because Iron Front hates clarity, and you equip your Mosin-Nagant rifle, hunt for that one button that makes you look through the scope rather than the iron sights, press it, line up your target in the period-appropriate crosshairs, and then restart Windows because you've been kicked to the desktop, and your mouse cursor has disappeared.

Iron Front is unfinished. Playing through a game, even with some of the bugs squashed, gives you a sense of confusion more than anything else. More patches may be on the way to shore up what there is of Iron Front, but as it stands now, you're better off avoiding these perilous battlefields.