Iron Core: Mech Survivor (Expecting lots of variaty off a game with a "survivors" suffix? Please.)

 

Weird. I had no blood effect on my playthrough. Guess it was for the better though, this looks really messy.

PR: The iron core is in danger because a signal has awakened all the insectoid and fungoid monsters, some of which explode on death—because that makes sense in video games—and they decide to attack. Where have all these monsters been during the rest of the apocalypse? No idea. What's the goal of the game besides simply surviving the waves? Also no idea. How does the lab, where "an experiment has gone wrong," fit into the story? I guess they've caused the apocalypse. I mean, c'mon, right? It's a classic scientific move.

The game is exactly what you'd expect from a game with such a title: it's a survivor-style game but with better graphics, and you're a mech soldier instead of some fantasy class. You also have side quests and are able to deploy turrets during your regular playthroughs, and there's metaprogression, so for what the survivors genre offers, it's a pretty good game overall.

Severely lacking on variety, though. Once you've completed the first map, all the others are literally the same loop with enemies that are the same but have a different sprite, even the elites have the same moves, and the final boss of each level is literally the same but a different color. Oh, except the one from the lab, which is basically a scarab.

I would like to point out some other issues regarding the side missions, one being that the generator thing that expands the safe zone, outside of which you take a bit of damage each second, can simply be left running unchecked, whilst the game appears to be balanced so that you actually have to defend the generator for a while. The second is that there's a particular side mission, rescuing the humans, which is super annoying. For starters, the vehicle that's supposed to transport them is comically slow, like less than half your speed, and despite being so resistant to damage, it can suddenly explode for no apparent reason. Once it exploded because I made the mistake of placing a turret on its pathway, like, a hundred feet away from its current location.

Another balancing issue is that the shotgun mech is so much better than the rest, it isn't even funny. There was a condition to unlock the "terminator" mech that was completing a map under 2 minutes and I just rushed the boss with an unupgraded shotgun mech in one minute twenty, only to find out that, despite the cool name, the terminator mech was worse. The rest of the mechs seem rather balanced, with the hunter mech being slightly worse, because it has very little health and damage in return for a little bit of pierce, which isn't that relevant.