IRONBORNE Review

IRONBORNE is described as a “mining roguelike bullet hell shoot ’em up”, developed and published by Tres Interactive. A homage to MotherLoad, in this game, you work as a freelancer for Obsidian Core Technologies, sent out onto the mineral-rich planet of Planet-14416331 to mine it for fun and profit! However, there are some things that are better left buried. Well, that was actually everything from the employee manual (read: Steam page description), sign me the heck up and let’s make some serious moolah!

The game starts with you being dropped off on the planet with only a dialogue box telling you to start mining… with no tutorial. It’s relegated to a help menu you might miss the first time around. It might be annoying, but not everyone is going to naturally assume that WASD moves your drilling rig (left, right, and down will activate the drill, but up will only let you fly), and the right click will throw an ore-sensing glowstick. There isn’t even a tooltip indicating what items do, so you have to figure it out by yourself. This could be someone’s first game, so treat it as such and, for experienced players, have an option to disable the tutorial.

Anyways, back to the job, you’ll be digging into the ground to find the most valuable minerals on the planet. Once you feel like you have enough cargo or you’re running out of fuel, you can head back to the surface and sell the ore, so you can use the cash earned to refuel, stock up on items, or upgrade your mining rig to be faster, tankier, and more efficient in mining.

However, within the depths of the planet lie some serious threats. Robots and turrets don’t like your mining and will try to kill you. Luckily, the company has provided you with some means of defence… that you’ll need to purchase first. You can buy a shotgun, a Gatling gun, and a rocket launcher to help take care of anything willing to get in your way, and they can also be upgraded.

There is a serious difference in performance for each upgrade, but I advise that you hold off on getting any. I learned that, if you have the money, you can just buy the most powerful upgrade without needing to buy the previous version. That’s greyed out once you do, so it’s cheaper to purchase the best one instead of slowly making your way up the list.

And you’ll need every upgrade and item you can get as you travel deeper and deeper into the planet. If you run out of HP or fuel, your mining rig explodes, and it’s game over. Depending on the difficulty you selected at the start of a new game, death could mean losing all the ore you mined, reloading from your last save, or needing to restart from the very beginning! I found myself worrying a lot about how much fuel I had because, unlike HP, it constantly drains with even the slightest of movements. You could potentially die driving to the refueling station, losing all your progress just at the edge of the safe zone.

Also, if you have saved in an unfortunate situation, you might need to delete your file and start from scratch (if you aren’t already). That’s why I recommend stocking up on Fuel Cans and having multiple saves to prevent such a scenario. I should mention to please remember to manually save, as sometimes the autosave doesn’t kick in, so you can lose quite a bit of progress if you aren’t careful.

In addition, I sort of have an issue with the “roguelike” description. It’s not really what I define as one unless you set it to Hard, and even then, that’s sort of a stretch; it’s just turning on Permadeath. Roguelikes tend to have runs that are pretty short and sweet, with you being able to jump on, do a few attempts, and then move on. That’s not the case here as it’s pretty much one continuous world, so I wouldn’t tag it as a roguelike.

Still, I had quite a bit of fun playing IRONBORNE. It calls back to simpler times, and it’s still pretty addictive. Just be mindful of your saves and time, and you should come out of it richer than before.