The Cold Season: Iron Grip: Warlord

The Cold Season is an exploration of independent video game Iron Grip: Warlord, a FPS/Tower Defense hybrid available via Steam et al. It’s quite good, and worth checking out, especially if you have friends to play it with. This is a look at the game’s strongest part, its atmosphere and its portrayal of war.

Khristos, when will there be another attack? I ask the thin man sitting next to me, smoking a cigarette. I don’t expect an answer. I’m playing with the barrel of my musket, the mechanical components worn because I swiped it from the corpse of another man, Oleg, on the battlefield outside some nameless castle. When soldiers come with sandbags I tell them where to put them. Another man arrives with the barrel of an anti-tank weapon, and I tell him to set up behind the statue in the square.

We are in the suburbs, outside the Maces Grand Palace. Our orders are simple: fend off a Confederate incursion. We don’t know that there will be one, but we wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t going to be an attack.

Khristos? I ask him again. He still doesn’t respond. He’s looking at the sunset behind the buildings like it’s the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

Don’t you think all these people would be better off? he asks me.

Better off without what? I ask. The suburbs around the palace have been civilian shelters since the start of the war, for refugees of the Confederate invasion.

Better off without us. Without war. Without guns or explosions, he pauses, taking a drag on his cigarette. They’d be better off without us.

I stare down the road, and I hear the rumbling of tires. I know the Confederates will be here, and they will bring guns with them. I wonder what Khristos knows that I do not know. I wonder if what he knows will help him get through the battle ahead, or whether it will be a liability, one that will make him party to the enemy. I contemplate turning him in to my commanding officer, Maicos, but I decide against it.

Besides, his gun is just another to replace mine when he dies in the name of our glorious cause. I hear the war cry of the Confederates, and I offer my own in response.

–

Iron Grip: Warlord is the game a student of history envisions when he hears of games about warfare. It is not Call of Duty, where ultra fast man-children prance about bragging about headshots, but rather an inevitable, deathly struggle with an overwhelming invading force. It’s about making each and every man count, until you’ve beaten back the tides of your oppressors.

It is war as strategy and war as twitch. Strategy is required to weather the storm, but twitch is required to win the day. Strategy can only deliver you a stalemate, a permanent grind of your troops against their troops, and while they’re giving up a hundred men to your one they have a hundred more to give. You set this strategy, and then you play hunter-killer: the man who will go out and kill the enemy officer, the unit worth more than three hundred enemy soldiers.

–

I watch Yurias and another man dive headlong into the Confederates, chewing up two dozen of them with light machine gun fire before they’re taken down by a man with the biggest gun I’ve ever seen.

Khristos is still alive, ducking in and out of buildings next to quaking civilians, huddled in the corners. He takes pot shots at enemy troops, desperate to stay alive. I do similarly, ducking into a tunnel underneath the city to avoid a steady stream of gunfire. Olaf, our gunner, lays down suppressing fire a street up, taking as many Confeds down as he possibly can.

Like shooting fish in a barrel! I shout to Khristos, my enthusiasm betrayed by the knowledge I could be dead at any second. These Confederate dogs die like anyone else!

Khristos turns to me, and the building he is inside goes up in an explosion of inhuman fury. He disappears in seconds, almost as if he were never there, as two civilians, two men, fly from the huddled safety of the floor above.

Keep fighting! a man named Yurias, a different Yurias, shouts. Those bastards may kill civilians, but we’ll be stronger for it. I wonder if there will be another Khristos, another man to take his place. I wonder how expendable we really are to the country.

–

You play Iron Grip: Warlord like a first person shooter, but you don’t tend to think about it like a first person shooter. It’s a strategy game where you shoot the nameless mass pushing towards you. It’s a strategy game where you walk forward with your compatriots and die, taking as many bastards with you as possible.

This is not a game about killing: this is a game about death. Most first person shooters glorify the kill: when you kill, it is glorious, and when you die, you are a stepping stone for someone else’s glory. Not in Iron Grip. Here, there is only death. When you walk from base with your five closest friends, you know that there is no way you will ever return. You will run into a group of twenty enemy soldiers, a tank, and an officer with the biggest gun you’ve ever imagined, and the glory is in taking as many of them with you as possible.

You will die, and then you will come back and do it again, because you are imminently replaceable. And you will barely make a difference: the line between success and failure is getting the opportunity to go out and die again.

–

I begin to wonder why we fight at all.

I’ve heard all the rhetoric, all the words between both sides, and yet I see the way this war is going. We, the good guys, keep losing battles, keep falling back with the enemy on our heels. The enemy, for their part, hit wherever they want with impunity, and no matter the losses they have the manpower to push through and destroy us.

And we don’t have the manpower to answer them.

Captain Kaminsky tells us otherwise. I’m back in base, a lull in the fighting, getting my weapon outfitted. He tells me, Andreas, you must not worry about territory. War is not fought over territory. War is fought over individuals, over their hearts and minds.

But these individuals are being killed by mortar fire, I tell him.

And every civilian who dies at the enemies hands will inspire another ten to rise up and take arms against the Confederates. This is not a war we can win today, Andreas, but one we can win in months, in years.

I swallow his words, and they are like a peach pit sticking in my throat. I hear the sounds of bullets and screaming from the block below, cock my rifle, and I remember how the battles had ended in the forests, in the hills, in the cities where the Confederates had fought in the past. I swallow deeply and rejoin the fray, bullets whizzing past my ears.

–

Iron Grip features a number of fascinating mechanics. It has a complex leveling system powered by how many enemies you kill (your kills also determine victory, as you have to kill enough enemies to demoralize the enemy), which lets you improve the troops you have with you. You can give them better weapons, more health, et cetera, and the results are immediately obvious on the field.

My favorite feature, though, is that you get extra resources for every civilian the enemy kills. It’s a small touch, but such a fascinating one. War games, in general, try to undervalue the suffering of those not directly involved in conflict: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has no desire to think about the people who used to live in the houses you’re now obliterating. Those people might as well not exist, because their existence could serve to decimate the illusion it tries to generate: war is fun.

And war, Iron Grip wants to remind you, is not fun. It is the breaking down of social civility to such a level that people’s lives, the most valuable things, are reduced to commodities that aren’t even counted. So civilians will die throughout the course of a game, and when the enemy kills them they will serve as resources you can use to build up your troops or your structures. With better troops and better defenses, you have a greater chance of stopping the invasion cold.

–

They’re retreating! the cry begins from the front. We’re winning!

Just a little bit more and we’ll have them on the ropes, Captain Kaminsky hollers, and we charge back into the breach like we were trained to do. Khristos takes a light rifle into cover and takes shots at the enemy, while Yurias sets up a heavy machine gun to lay down fire on the approaching Confederates. We can see it in their eyes: they are beaten, and we will be victorious. We will have held our ground against the enemy. This will have been a grand victory for our government, and from here we could move forward and conquer other territories.

The enemies’ spirits break, and we are on top of them in an instant. As our bullets cut through the enemy, I hear a siren off in the distance, signaling a retreat. Khristos looks down at the dirt, now a copper red, and he begins to shake like he has seen a ghost.

Khristos?

We have won another meaningless victory, he says. A couple civilians poke their heads out of a small building behind him, and they cautiously ask whether or not it’s over. I look at them and I tell them it’s over as the siren blares a second time. Khristos shakes his head again.

It will never be over, not until we are all dead and our country is razed. Here, now, it will begin again.

I look up at the sky, and I see the ships above. It is here that I see his meaning as fire overtakes me.

–

The cruel joke of Iron Grip is that you can never win. Even if you manage to kill every enemy, force them to retreat, you still lose. You still die. The bombs will still fall and they will obliterate all the work you put in. If you’re playing the levels of the game in order, each mission will see your side fall further and further behind the enemy, with the Confederates taking more and more territory.

The war is pointless, in the end. No matter how well you fight the battle, no matter how your commando raids into enemy territory to kill bigwig officers go, you will die, and you will die permanently. Your death is inevitable; your success or failure is only tied to the success or failure of a nameless, faceless cause.

Like in a real war, success is not winning or losing, it’s how much you get out of the game.