Iron Grip Warlord

http://igwarlord.isotx.com/

As I tried the demo of this game, a sort of tower defense FPS, I was sucked in, even when I didn't know the range of my talents, like building defensive structures or laying trip wire mines and poison gas traps, like buying a better weapon that the standard issue musket with its drawn out laborious reload time, even when I ignored all of this, I still enjoyed the ride. On easy difficulty, the demo map was a twisting winding set of streets interconnected with buildings and basements and ramps and tunnels. The Objective of the game is to defend a Stronghold, against a relentless wave after wave assault from an increasingly resourceful Confederate army. When they start to send rocket launching and flame throwing elites, and I was still taking single pot shots at them from upstairs windows it seemed like a insurmountable quest, but one which kept drawing me to it, like a moth to a paraffin flame. Once you fathom out that your power meter at the bottom, fills up slowly as your AI teammates make kills, you can utilise this power to purchase and build key defensive measures. Pressing 'G' will flip you into a top down, RTS style mode, where you can buy machine gun nests, supply stations, trip wires, poison traps, Anti-tank turrets and the like. Dropping these in place at choke points and crossroads is vital to holding back the flow of multipathing enemies. Pressing 'M' allows you to use some of your power reserve to buy different weapons, and a much machine gun with grenade launcher can come in very handy.
As time progresses, Elite troops wade in, and some take meandering paths, designed to flank you, or keep you at bay whilst the main body of troops march onward to your stronghold. With more and more troops on the field mini-bosses in the form of Officers turn up, with chainguns blazing, and these are tough cookies to deal with. They also seem to dodge in and out of buildings, so laying waste to an officer usually involves pursuit, and thinning his bodyguard minions. Then you find yourself up against Armoured vehicles, in the demo, you are menaced by a tank, a machine gun toting and explosive shell throwing killing machine. These things require repeated shelling or grenading, your molotov cocktails won't make much of an impact here. Setting up a string of trip wire mines will help weather them down. And pumping in MG grenades in from a shielded position might help. In the full game, you will meet up with spider walking mechs with bouncing fireball shells, that can devastate an area rather quickly, torching your defenses.

If your stronghold goes down, and you have the power resources to rebuild it, then get it back soldier, and make it snappy. The game tends to ebb and flow as you run around and find power pickups, and you lay waste to lots of enemies at bottleneck choke points. Downing an officer and taking his chaingun, spraying a path through the advancing cannon fodder can be very therapeutic. If your defenses take a battering, you can swap to your spanner, and start to repair them, whilst dodging the bullets. You can also upgrade the defenses if you can harvest enough power to do so..

So, in the end, you're placed in a tower defense style game, where you can not only lay down defensive placements, but you can go lone wolf and have a gun toting role to play in stemming the flow. Checking the map and reacting to enemy outbreaks down the different paths is one of the main strategic elements to master. And one which if mastered can alter the whole outcome of the conflict. It can turn into a war of attrition, but one in which you're at the frontline, making the decisions and also making the plays with your shooting and strafing and dodging skills. Map knowledge is also key, to turn run of the mill streets into killing zones. You can run the game in single player mode, where your teammates are AI controlled and they do a decent enough job, turning their hand to whatever (laying down fire, repairing mechanisms etc). You can also run a dedicated server, and have people connect to join you co-operatively in the defensive carnage. Or you can join an official server (although at the time, the most people I saw playing on an official server was about 6).

I like shooters. And I like Tower defense games. Put them both together, with the possibility of co-op play, and I can see why it draws me in.