Iron Danger

If you’ve played a fair amount of RPGs you probably have abused quick-saving at least a few times in your life. Saving between every move, making sure everything is perfect, or reloading to just a few seconds prior when something goes wrong. It’s a little exploit-y but we accept it as part of playing hard RPGs. Well, what if I told you Iron Danger is a game built around that exact principle? With challenges balanced around your ability to rewind and without the annoying load times. No exploits here! Just good old perfectionist fun.

Iron Danger delivers on its promise to combine real-time and turn-based gameplay to create a time-bending mechanic that opens up new possibilities for the genre. Unfortunately, an engaging narrative does not accompany the polished combat. Nonetheless, players are still offered a strong gameplay experience that is easy to understand but challenging to perfect in the 12 or so hours of content.

Iron Danger is as charming as it's filled with environmental traps and time crimes. Also, you heal when you enter a sauna.

While figuring out the right set of moves can be frustrating, Iron Danger is a unique RPG-style combat experience combined with a strong story and audio/visual presentation.

Iron Danger is an interesting story of a young woman who obtains magical powers from a shard impaling her. The tactical combat and ARPG mechanics make for clever gameplay and a lack of grinding, although some fights are frustrating. The story itself is good, but the ending drags it down a lot by leaving you unsatisfied and wanting more.

Iron Danger is a tactical combat game based around a unique time-control mechanic. It's fascinating, but is that enough to keep you coming back for more?

Have you ever seen the film Frequency, starring Dennis Quaid and Jim Caviezel? I'm not asking for any particular reason other than I recently re-watched the film and I like it. Actually, there is another reason, Frequency - like Iron Danger (read my earlier preview here) - deals with a very loose interpretation of time travel. In Frequency, there's a radio that can talk to itself thirty years in the past, or future depending on your perspective. In Iron Danger, a magical shard has embedded itself into a character's chest, letting her move back ten heartbeats.

The unique time manipulating tactics make this game an interesting strategy game, but also a somewhat tedious one.

Iron Danger describes itself as a “tactical combat game”. It contains elements of traditional RPG and turn-based strategy games but introduces a unique mechanic that drastically changes the way this game is played.