The Final Word game review

Iron Storm -- Working Design

Relive the action and strategy of World War II in your own living room with Working Design's Iron Storm, for the Sega Saturn. In this detailed hex-based simulation, you have the ability to control either Germany, Japan, or the United States. Features include unique animated sequences for each combat action, along with historical backgrounds and more. With your selection made, the object is clear -- win the war and potentially change history.

Jester
Working Designs delivers the goods again. This time with an awesome WWII simulator (is some one eventually going to sim something other than WWII and the Civil War but I digress). Anyway what you have here is a heavily option ladden sim that allows you to play single battles or an all out all encompassing campaign. No matter what you choose to do you can play any side in the conflict and have a ton of options at your fingure tips, to make the game as easy or as hard as you want. As an added plus the battles are resolved in awesome animation sequnces that you won't soon tire of.

R.I.P.
I normally find hex-based war sims to be the prime example of what NOT to play on a console, but Iron Storm shines as an example of how a hex-sim can be entertaining (Vasteel for the Duo would be the other example). One of the things in its favor is the fact that you can almost get away with playing the game without taking a single look at the manual, and lets face it, who reads the game manuals for anything but RPGs anyways unless you're really bored, or just curious. Eh... wait, who reads RPG manuals? You usually flip them open to the inventory tables and leave it at that. Anyways, back to the game at hand... Playcontrol was good and once you learned what buttons did what, you could breeze through the game. Replay value was pretty good, although I think I would have come back more to a sim based on anything other than WWII (which is a pretty tired theme for sims as far as I'm concerned). The one thing that helped about it being a WWII sim though is that since I am pretty familiar with the equipment and tactics used in that war (I used to build WWII combat dioramas), I was able to actually win some scenarios right off the bat. Hex-sim fans should consider this a must have.

------ 41.5/50 -------		--Jester--	--R.I.P.--
Graphics		4.0	4.0
Sound		3.0	4.0
Gameplay/Control		4.5	4.5
Longevity/Playability		4.5	4.5
Overall		4.0	4.5
Total		20.0	21.5

(07/96)