Sometimes it’s easy to forget that I have to update games. As the industry drives itself off a cliff like a drunk driver listening to the wrong GPS, and the summer drought sets in, leaving us bereft of games, I’ve been so busy writing stories that review work has fallen by the wayside.
But here we are, back to the seat. Well, on a drone, anyway.
Iron Guard: Day Zero is a tower defense strategy game, a genre I only occasionally get into but still deeply enjoy. It’s essentially a redesigned flat-screen replacement for the original Iron Guard VR, designed both as a more accessible PS5 version and as a gateway to the VR-born tower defense series. It’s not really Iron Guard 3, and it’s not an untouched port. The original VR game was dragged around without a headset, refined, taught how to use DualSense, and sent out into the wider PS5 world to see if anyone outside the VR bubble was paying attention. It’s a little….er, confusing, really.
Available On: PS5
Updated On: PS5
Developed by: Xlab Digital
Published by: Xlab DigitalReview the code provided by the publisher.
Iron Guard: Day Zero’s plot is simple. Your ship has crashed on a world inhabited only by terraformers. For some reason, the planet seems deserted. There are buildings, roads, and a whole network of infrastructure, but no people use any of them. No one is too busy wondering where the nearest Starbucks is, or complaining loudly that the McDonald’s on this corner is not as good as the McDonald’s on the other corner.
Naturally, you quickly find out that the robots on this planet are crazy and would love to kill you. Your goal is to survive 30 levels of campaigns by defending the tower, which basically means building whatever you can, wherever you’re allowed, to hold off the attack.
In terms of stories, it’s all very forgettable. The game does its best, but the voice acting isn’t exactly up to snuff, often leaving the characters sounding flat and toned down. That’s not helped by the writing, which is equally flat and monotone. There’s not much more to say about it without sounding like an ass: it’s forgettable. It does just about enough to explain why you’re stuck on this planet shooting robots, and that’s about it.
There are a few moments where the game seems to be watching itself as a twist, but it’s surprising as you’re told that a big company doesn’t care about your happiness. Other than that, there isn’t much to say about the story.
Almost every level in Iron Guard: Day Zero follows the exact same template: defend your base. I mean, this is a tower defense game, after all.
That means you are given multiple routes leading to your base, all of them full of construction sites where you can use various turrets and defenses to face the onslaught of enemy drones and terraformers that charge you like iron rulers who want to launch your skull directly into the AI mind.
Just like the real world, though, you need a building permit before you can just knock things down, and even then, you can’t just put them wherever you bloody fancy. Turrets can only be placed at designated points, so success lies in figuring out which defenses to build, where to build them, and in what order. And to fund all this fancy equipment, you need to reduce incoming tides to little more than scrap metal.
The key to holding off enemy attacks is mixing your turrets well. Electric turrets are great for taking out shields and, more importantly, slowing down enemies. A normal cannon turret is usually best for dealing with large numbers of small, fast enemies, but once it’s upgraded to deal a lot more damage. Rocket turrets are the only things that can deal with flying enemies, so spreading them out liberally helps a lot. The laser turret is powerful and powerful, but it takes ages to reload, as if someone had to run to the store and buy a new pack of batteries every two seconds. The flamethrower, on the other hand, is best used for dealing long-range damage, meaning it usually works best near the start of your defense when it really has time to work.
Iron Guard: Day Zero’s one original twist on the tower defense genre is that you control a drone in the sky using two analog sticks. With this drone, you fly around the battlefield, point to the building blocks, bring up the radial menu to decide what to build, and voilà, the turrets are built. You can develop them using the same method, and you can also create resource products, which we will return to later.
Most importantly, however, he is able to engage directly in combat. Your drone has a small laser gun that can be used to blast enemy drones and terraformers. It does a little annoying damage, but still, despite that, it can make a noticeable difference in combat. You’ll often find yourself flying between different lanes, trying to figure out which explosive might be needed the most. The second charge attack can also be useful against shielded enemies.
A few upgrades later make your drone feel more powerful, but it never quite feels useful enough, which is incredibly at odds with the fact that you can actually make a difference when you use it. You can target a single enemy and hold the trigger until the heat meter fills up and your gun stops firing, yet feel like you haven’t put a dent in their health bar. A strange difference, but there we have it.
Flying enemies don’t attack your base directly, but they attack your drone, disabling your gun and special abilities. Those abilities are probably the most useful things your drone has: a chemical weapon that can be deployed on the battlefield to deal massive damage to an area over time, and an aerial attack designed to take out anything unfortunate enough to be on the road beneath it. Both work, both run time, and both can be improved.
Some levels also include obstacles in the tracks. Instead of having straight roads leading directly to your base, these maps are more complex and allow you to spend a small amount of resources gained from killing robots to raise barrier gates at designated locations. These enemy routes redirect, often allowing you to lengthen the route and force attackers to bypass defensive points.
I love this element. It’s an interesting strategic twist, though I’m sure other tower defense games have done similar things before. Trying to figure out the best way to deal with enemy lanes often feels more interesting than using turrets, which can become a decent level after a few rounds once you figure out what to combine and where to put them. Little by little figuring out how to send a bunch of enemy units an extra three kilometers around your city before they reach your location is satisfying.
Speaking of gameplay twists, Iron Guard: Day Zero occasionally tries to throw in something to spice things up. For example, one very late mission sees you fend off a group of bugs as they try to make it back to the base. It’s kind of an interesting game, although admittedly this particular level does use the idea in a bad way at times. I ended up freaking out, but it’s not the show’s best mechanic.
Some levels allow you to play as long as you need because your goal is to earn a certain amount of money rather than survive a set number of waves. Others change the objective to defend until the progress bar reaches 100%. Usually, these are more like stat changes or UI changes than meaningful shakeups. You are still protecting the waves and waiting for something to break them; it’s just that instead of counting down 12 waves, you watch the bar fill up.
Still, it’s good that the game is at least trying. Throughout the 30 campaign levels, however, it feels like there was room for a few interesting ideas to be added to the mix rather than relying too much on straight-up tower defense.
Throughout the campaign, you are awarded points at the end of each task that you can spend on upgrading. These are the most common ride times. Turrets can be upgraded so you can buy new, more advanced versions of them mid-level, alongside passive buffs that make each one more effective. Similarly, you can unlock things like your base’s ability to repair itself a little, upgrades to your air weapon and damage weapon, upgrades to resource mines, and a few other bits.
There’s enough variety here to make you feel like you have a little control over your preferred play style and the direction of your defense, but ultimately not much. A few improvements feel useful, a couple feel empty, and most sit comfortably in the middle as useful but unexciting additions.
In other words, the upgrade system is perfect. It exists. It gives you something to spend points on between missions, but it doesn’t add much personality or depth to the experience.
There are a few other edges worth mentioning, too. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, a few levels caught me off guard with unexpected difficulty. Usually, this just meant replaying a mission once or twice to get the right turret placement or lane strategy, so it was more annoying than disastrous, but it did make the campaign feel uneven in places.
In conclusion…
The problem Iron Guard: Day Zero faces is that aside from the VR gimmick, there isn’t much else left.
It’s not that the game lacks talent or is completely bad. That’s not the case. It is a fully functional tower defense game. But without a headset strapped to my face and sweat dripping down my forehead, what am I really left with? Mostly, it’s a bog-standard tower defense title that struggles to find anything memorable to call its own.
The drone you control manually sets it a bit apart, allowing you to fly around the battlefield, build and upgrade turrets, and directly contribute to the fight. But it doesn’t make the game enough. And the story doesn’t do much to make things more interesting. What’s left is the standard selection of turrets, standard enemy waves, standard upgrade methods, and standard tower defense problems that have been solved hundreds of times before in other games.
That leaves Day Zero in the wrong place. It’s not bad enough to be interestingly bad, or different enough to be really fun. That’s right. It’s a brilliant, playable, largely forgettable tower defense game that might make more sense when its familiar concepts are experienced inside a VR headset.
