The extreme lethality of the world, particularly here, make being booted back to a save point into an agonising experience. For reasons of persistence and so forth, multiplayer games do not seem to face this precisely problem.
The excruciating grind of this campaign reminds us of why the Arma campaigns never really work. (The voice acting and so-forth is enthusiastic, but predictable awful.) Yes, the campaign experience hangs between dry simulation and parodic slapstick. By this time I've been shot by Russian riflemen I will never see. I am forced to go into the gear menu and jettison it just to see where I am going. The Panzerfaust I had picked up from a previous part of mission is on my back – modelled accurately, as per Arma 2's methodology – but that means when I go prone, to avoid being shot, the blast shield from the thing drops in front of my face. The missions unravel bafflingly, while smaller issues make it feel like it has not had even basic player-annoying problems addressed. Yes, it routinely feels like a shonky mock up. Iron Front doesn't often make that possible. Hell, even if the AI completes the objective, try and get the player in a position where he can see some of what is going on. The trick to making campaigns work in an open-ended world like this one, is to stage your set pieces in situations where the player really gets to feel a part of action.
Arma 2 handles this range of situations marvellously, but the experience is one that seems constantly hampered by the lack of vision from the designers. You can play from the Nazi perspective, or from the Red Army perspective, and the situations that face you ramp up from small scale infantry engagements, to full-blown battlefields with aircraft and angry houses. They're set in 1944, with the Nazis tryign to hold off the Red Army attacks. Let's look at those two campaigns for a moment. That's not to say this comes without problems, and further opportunities for criticism. What we have here is an all-encompassing World War II sim, that does more for Eastern Front battle antics than a couple of years of wargame releases. This is not a traditional FPS, despite its scripted campaign, and the real meat lies in the editor and the multiplayer, and not the two campaigns that the development team have clearly invested so much time in. There are plenty of fine World War II shooters, yes, and many of them are both atmospheric and slick, but what Iron Front does is something quite different – it tries to make a sim of that experience, with dramatic consequences. And those charges won't be baseless – I've seen a crash to desktop with this, the release version of the game – but they will generally miss the point. There will be the standard charges levelled at this, which are frequently levelled at its parent military sim, Arma 2, which is that it is fiddly, clunky, and occasionally buggy. Iron Front, with patriotic solider sim blood pumping in its veins, has charged out in the open, and is now exposed from all angles to headshots of leaden criticism. What's a man to do if he's bored with Arma 2, and tired of Day Z, but still wants meticulous rifle-toting in Bohemia's soldier sim engine? Should he look to history and pick up X1's Iron Front: Liberation 1944? Or is this a trip to the Eastern front too many? Here's wot I think.
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