What is the perfect level of clunk to have in a mech shooter? It’s a question that has preoccupied me during my time with Iron Rebellion. As I pen these impressions, I’ve come to the conclusion that if there is an optimum amount of the stuff, Iron Rebellion is pretty close to having it.
What I mean by ‘clunk,’ of course, is that heady combination of rendered rust, loud stomping and nauseating lurching that is such a staple of the mech genre, and it’s especially important to those of a VR persuasion. Too much clunk, where you fight the floaty controls as much as the enemy, and you’ll start to question why you’re pretending to wear a pair of heavy metal war britches in the first place. Too little, and you may as well fire up a first-person shooter and play that instead.
It’s a tricky balance to get right, not least because we all have our preferences on what a mech game should be. Some like the idea of being lashed inside the cockpit of a giant bipedal tank, surrounded by more panels, dials, gauges, and switches than a Boeing 747 with a Space Shuttle strapped to the roof. Others will prefer to don what is essentially a suit of power armor that allows them to leap and shoot with effortless anime abandon.
Iron Rebellion, if you hadn’t already guessed, is closer to the former. In it, you are clearly piloting a vehicle, using the left control stick for movement and the right for weapons tinkering. For pretty much everything else, you get to flick diegetic switches and pull levers, mostly to use abilities and equipment, pick up ammo and repair kits, and to power down, which is a necessary prelude to effecting repairs. Basically, there’s just the right amount of VR faff to convince you that you are indeed an ace combat jockey strutting about the battlefield in the ultimate sci-fi combat trousers.
‘Just the right amount’ actually sums up Iron Rebellion pretty well. There’s nothing that feels particularly new or innovative, but what’s here is finely tuned and balanced. You’ve got your light, medium, and heavy frames, of course, but whereas in some mech games there’s not enough to distinguish between them, here they fulfill very specific battlefield roles. That’s with the added versatility of being about to tweak your loadout every time you’re brought down.
Your choice of frame, weapons, and equipment is limited by your rank, which can thankfully be increased just as much by playing against bots as real players. Advancement is rapid and, again, there’s a good selection of maps and game modes; team deathmatch and conquest being the best and most popular. Just the right amount, you might say.
Black Beach Studio has evidently made a little go a long way, which is laudable. What’s here is works well, but it could benefit from having a little more meat on its metal bones. Next to its closest competitor, Vox Machinae, Iron Rebellion – which admittedly hasn’t had the benefit of being quite as long in open development – looks a little lightweight. Both games are very similar in terms of pace and controls, but with its rusting sandblasted hulks, Vox Machinae has more of a visual identity where Iron Rebellion sports a more generic look in comparison.
Thankfully, Iron Rebellion has an immediacy and poise that the more established game lacks. Despite missing a significant solo component (AI bots aside), the variety in mech scale and speed – and optimal clunk – edges it ever so slightly above the competition.
