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Iridion 3D: Reviews

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Game Score: 4/10

Iridion 3D is an interesting game - 'interesting' being in the historical sense. Weighing in at barely 2.5MB, this is one tiny game - hardly surprising, considering that it came out near the beginning of the Gameboy Advance's lifespan.

The game is an arcade space shooter - you know the ones, a single spaceship/aircraft flys up the screen, shooting everything that moves and occasionally picking up weapons upgrades. However, the game dispenses with the traditional, flat, top-down view - instead, the game camera is fixed behind your ship, which flies forwards into the ranks of the enemy. The enemies themselves are polygonal models, rather than hand-drawn pixel art, as is the enviorenment - hence the "3D" of the title.

The game does actually have a plot of some kind, which is odd for a space shooter. Admittedly it's a basic one - robotic aliens start raining down out of the sky to invade earth, you blast into action using your highly advanced fighter (which the government only saw fit to make one of), and defend Earth against the extra-terrestrial menace, before taking the fight to the aliens' homeworld and destroying the central core/hive mind/driving consciousness thing. As I said, fairly basic. However, the levels do actually reflect this change of location - each one has a completely different style of scenery and set of enemies.

Controls are fairly basic - the arrow keys move your ship around the screen, and the "B" button fires your guns (no secondary weapons here). Select pauses the game, and... that's about it. Quite basic. Which it has to be, as the game's difficultly doesn't need augmenting.

The game consists of seven levels of enemies flying at you, with a boss fight at the end of each. At this point, it should be noted that there is another area where Iridion differs from normal top-down space arcade games. You actually can't survive a great deal of punishment, and health powerups are few and far between. Same for weapons powerups. And the enemies, while they aren't very reactive, still take a fair bit of dodging.

It's at this point that the "3D" nature of the game becomes a handicap - the combination of the view angle and the limited size of the gameboy's screen, means that you're constantly getting in your own way, and pinpoint aiming when you're anywhere other than right in the middle of the screen is almost impossible.

Also, the game can't help but feel rather... repetitive. The levels drag on for increasing lengths of time, although luckily you can restart at a higher level using the passcodes given to you after each boss battle. Even so, you find yourself getting rather bored before too long. It wouldn't be so bad if the scenery changed occasionally, but the floor/walls/clouds of whatever you happen to be flying through stay very regular.

And finally, the boss fights... challenging, yes - but they aren't especially rewarding. All that happens when you defeat one is a few explosions pepper the surface in a slapdash sort of way. No bits breaking off, no juddering to a halt, not even a drop out of sight off the screen for the flying ones. And if you're going to have a game with bosses this difficult, you ought to at least reward the player with a flasy graphic. Same story with the final ending sequence (although that is pretty much a given in this style of game anyway).

Iridion 3D is, when you really get down to it, an experiment - a testing out of what the newly released Gameboy Advance was capable of, as well as attempting to put a new spin on an old staple of the gaming industry. And unfortunately, it's an experiment that only half succeeds, before proceeding to shoot itself in the foot with it's own novelty. A pity, considering that the premise for the game is not a bad one.