There are a lot of games out there where you jump into a tank, or you can temporarily take control of some smallish artillery piece and point and shoot at some digital enemy. Then there is IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator, developed and published by Nick Nieuwoudt and Dominik Latos and I can sum up my feelings in one word: BOOM!
IRON NEST puts you inside a giant dieselpunk walking artillery piece and asks you to do something that I hadn’t experienced before in a game that sounds far more complicated than it has any right to: actually work out where the hell you need to fire the thing. I’m sure that other games might have done similar things, like a u-boat game where you have to work out stuff to shoot your torpedoes, but this is my first time playing a game of this calibre. Yes, I went there.
I want to give kudos to it for setting itself not in WWI or WW2, or the works of Neal Shusterman’s Scythe, but in an alternate history version of 1920s Spain. You wake up from your bed in the bowels of the Iron Nest and you are greeted by your cat, which is customisable, and your coffee machine. On the level above you is where the real action of IRON NEST takes place.
On the main level of the Iron Nest you are given an area that feels really tactile. When I have been playing, part of me wondered if this was thought up as a VR game, but I am happy it’s just a keyboard and mouse gig. You walk around the inside of your walking gun, unable to see the outside, but you are surrounded by the intel printing machine, the map table with markers, requisition area, distance/angle calculator and a whole host of knobs and levers to pull. I must admit, part of me felt that IRON NEST had a kind of Snowpiercer feel to it, as I was always on my own, so I felt that there must be street urchins in each vent and duct somehow keeping the great machine working. I kept on imagining I would turn a corner to find an NPC named Klaus whose entire existence was just to tighten one particular bolt every Tuesday. Playing it I always felt like there was a lot of pressure on me, and that I had to get the maths right or people would die.
And there is a lot of maths.
The basic gameplay loop is surprisingly simple and beautiful. The faceless High Command tells you where you are, gives you a target and either its locations or clues to it. You locate the relevant position on your map, measure the distance and bearing, work out the firing solution, set up the gun, load the correct ammunition, and then I, sitting in my living room, shout “FIRE!” As I pull the firing chord on the gun. The problem is that each step gives you just enough room to make a proper mess of things.
In one example, I had to blow up a train and I knew it would be in o ne of three locations at certain times. I had done a dummy run to work out and write down how fast a shell would travel if I used a certain number of shell charges. So I knew that when my timer hit four minutes and 35 seconds into the level, I should fire. I managed to get my first attempt ready with 20 seconds to spare. I waited for the right second, shouted “FIRE!” (if you don’t, then why are you even playing?) and watched as I had totally forgotten to change Iron Nests horizontal angle and my shell travelled the right height, distance and time, and struck the bottom of the map. I had more chances, but I couldn’t be bothered and restarted the level. I wanted it to be perfect.
Another time, I had to destroy an enemy troop location, and I knew exactly where it would be, and that it wouldn’t move. What I didn’t know was that it was next to a hospital. I hit it dead on. I killed the troops I wanted to, but also wiped out an innocent hospital. I restarted the level, and this time, scouted the target first with a flare, then used an armour piercing shell (as its blast radius was so much smaller) to hit the troops without hitting the hospital. VICTORY!
That’s not even where IRON NEST gets most compelling. The game doesn’t give you the satisfaction of simply pressing a button and watching a crosshair turn green. Instead, there is a genuine sense of achievement when everything lines up (and I remember to do everything I need to) and the shell lands where I intended. It might be that you got told that the enemy location is 7.2 km away from spotter 1, and 2 km from spotter 2, so using the map table, you make circles around both spotter locations and one of the two cross over points is where the enemy will be.
It helps that you can use flares to reveal parts of the map, or send recon flights. Your shots also reveal parts of the map as they land. All of this helps you build a picture of your field of battle. Sometimes what you see can change, or the intel you were given has a margin of error and you are then given corrections after firing. It’s tense, but in such a brilliant way.
IRON NEST is basically Battleships for people who feel that Battleships didn’t have enough bureaucracy involved.
If you are a fan of Warhammer 40K then you could easily imagine that the setting is actually on some random planet and you are a nameless Imperial Guardsman, fighting from his lone position after the rest of your crew was killed due to some out of date corpse starch. Someone, please mod the game to make this a reality for me.
There is no getting around the fact that IRON NEST is a very specific sort of game. If your idea of an artillery simulator is one where you push a button, watch an explosion and immediately move to the next target, IRON NEST may feel less like entertainment and more like an actual job. There were times where I knew that the enemy artillery would start to zero in on me once I fired my first shell. So I would load both barrels, aim where I thought the first artillery was, and having already developed my firing solutions on the next two sites, I would fire one shell, move to the second as fast as possible and fire the second barrel. Then I would load, aim and fire at the third hopefully before the enemy got off a shot at me. I wouldn’t have looked at the map board until the first two shells were in the air, just hoping that I was right and I might have enough time to try again if I had missed. If you take a hit, if you don’t die immediately, you will be running around repressurising as many pipes as you can in order to stay in the fight.
IRON NEST also does a good job of giving you reasons to keep playing once you’ve got the basics down. There are different regions, procedural objectives, unlockable ammunition and abilities, and additional equipment that gradually expands what your artillery platform can do. It means the game isn’t simply a one-and-done demonstration of its central gimmick. There is a proper progression system underneath it, even if the fundamental appeal remains the same: calculate, load, aim, fire, discover whether you are a genius or an idiot.
Usually, I found, I was both.
There are some possible frustrations for some. The lack of a mid-mission save system is particularly noticeable because the missions can demand a decent chunk of your time, and the game’s deliberate pace means you can’t necessarily just blast through one if you’ve suddenly realised you have somewhere else to be. On the flip though, it removes save scumming to win a mission.
But I don’t think IRON NEST is trying to be all things to all people. In fact, one of its greatest strengths is that it knows exactly what it wants to be. It wants you to operate an enormous artillery machine. That’s it. And it turns out that’s a surprisingly good idea.
So get your shells loaded, and join me on the field of battle as you can hear me in Yorkshire shouting at my monitor, say it with me now: FIRE!
Iron Nest is available now, on PC.
