I once pretended to be friends with someone because they had a Playstation and I didn’t. It’s not my proudest moment, but I do have fond memories of going over to his house and playing video games non-stop. He introduced me to Final Fantasy VII, but he had several other lesser known releases. The other day I was thinking of one of these games in particular; a 3D fighting game called Iron & Blood. I remember being blown away by the graphics, and that it was a lot of fun. I decided to track it down and relive some fond memories. My memory was playing some major tricks on me; Iron and Blood is not only repulsive for its time but also quite terrible to play.
I didn’t realize it back when I first played it but Iron & Blood: Warriors of Ravenblood is actually based on the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons license. That’s not necessarily a good thing in my eyes because I’ve never been a fan of D&D, but I know lots of people who are. The decision to make a fighting game based on this franchise, a pen and paper role playing game, is an interesting decision. The setting lends itself to some nice scenery and diverse characters at least. Speaking of the roster you have sixteen fighters to choose from. These include a goblin, gargoyle, several types of knight, executioner, werewolf, a one armed dwarf, and more. The characters are all highly generic unfortunately. Why use the Dungeons and Dragons license if you’re not going to go all out?
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| It sure tries to be edgy, but you can only do so much with the Dungeons and Dragons motif. |
This brings me to the fighting engine which is, in one word, horrible. Being an early PlayStation game is no excuse in this case as games like Tekken were already on the scene. Iron & Blood doesn’t even have the basics down. While battles take place in a 3D arena, and you do have the ability to dive away from or towards the camera to avoid attacks it’s a very messy system. First of all the game doesn’t give you an control of which direction your character faces. Should you or your opponent move out of the two dimensional plain you’re in trouble because the game handles correcting the direction you’re aiming itself. Intuitive this system is not; pressing a button during this process stops your character from turning around completely I found that taking advantage of the poor collision detection by striking the wrong way and still hitting the other fighter worked a lot better than waiting for your character to correct themselves.
That alone is enough to break the game, but that’s not the end of its woes. The camera is one aspect of any fighting game that you absolutely shouldn’t have to battle, but alas it’s a major problem here in Iron & Blood. The issue is that it’s not locked into a side view and it has the propensity to go behind the back of one of the characters. This often blocks the view of either your or the opponent. You often can’t tell how close or far away you are which is absolutely ridiculous in a genre that requires precision like this. Pair this with the fact that you aren’t automatically facing the other character and you have a real mess on your hands. Button mashing is your only option here but even that’s clunky. Animations are stiff and all of them have too much cool-down. Pulling off special attacks is difficult, and you can’t button mash. So what’s left to do? You can try and chain together strikes but it’s too hard. The game is just too hard to play, and in the hours I spent with it I simply couldn’t master any sort of technique through the janky mechanics.
The only thing the game has going for it is in the game modes. You have the standard one player mode where you slog through all of the opponents, but there’s also a team mode (wherein you acquire and equip items to improve fighter performance) and of course two players can also duke it out (if you’re feeling like punishing a friend with this mess, that is). That’s more options than your typical fighting game, but when the basic gameplay is so poor it doesn’t really matter. The interface is also painfully bad with a weird character select screen and flames from a torch representing your life in battle. It’s supposed to add atmosphere but all it does is make this look like a cheap shovelware title.
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| This is a common camera angle during gameplay. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? |
Iron & Blood looks decent in screenshots. When I researched it online it was the game I remembered it being with impressive (for the time) character models and its own unique style. In motion is an entirely different story. The animations are among the worst I’ve seen in the genre and almost look like what you would expect from something like the 3DO or Jaguar. They’re stiff, feature too few frames, and are incredibly clunky. The environments are flat and incredibly unimpressive. They definitely don’t live up to the franchise, and are so generic you could throw them in almost any similar game and no one would be the wiser. This is just a bad looking game all around. The audio fares a little better but it just doesn’t fit. First off, the voice samples are low quality and the acting is god awful. Iron & Blood would have been more palatable without them. Secondly, I went in expecting a medieval sounding arrangement of music. Hard rock would also have been acceptable. Instead we get this weird mix of techno and electronic. It’s actually pretty decent but hardly fits the atmosphere.
