Iron Fish

Iron Fish is a psychological thriller from developers Beefjack and Dean Edwards and has recently been released for players on PC, but unfortunately the potential Iron Fish had to be a chilling tale of intrigue is overshadowed by a number of issues that range from irritating to downright ruinous.

To outline the story first of all, you play as Cerys, an underwater investigator who communicates with her ally Marshall in order to check out a distress signal that went uninvestigated, however, as with most thrillers you uncover some dark secrets and delve further and further into the mystery surrounding these lost submarines as well as involving your own father.

For the most part, the story isn't particularly gripping. The dialogue between Cerys and Marshall can seem false, even a bit forced sometimes, and the relationship isn't built upon enough to make it feel meaningful. Marshall is effective as the dreary-voiced superior, however, but Cerys' lines are often bordering on cheesy and/or uninteresting, so the exchanges never quite feel powerful enough to pull you into the story that is unravelling.

The more chilling parts of the story that emerge are well executed for the most part, and, without spoiling anything, there are scary moments that come out of nowhere and really startle you, but they are used sparingly enough to make them effective. The game gradually slips more and more into this sinister atmosphere while maintaining the mystery, so at times we were really tense while we were exploring certain areas for fear of the unknown.

The ocean is also done quite well in Iron Fish, and the sand, the underwater foliage and rock formations do make you really feel like you're in a vast body of water, especially when you go deeper and the darkness seems overwhelming. The scatterings of shipwrecks and areas of intrigue also give the ocean a sense of history and reality, encouraging players to explore everything they come across.

However, exploration is made difficult by the fact that Cerys moves extremely slowly. When outside of your submarine, it's the underwater equivalent of a casual stroll to every destination, which is painful to experience, especially since oxygen depletes as you swim. In the submarine, or the aquajet, you move a bit faster, but considering the size of the ocean you still take ages to get anywhere.

Fiddly controls also mean that exploration isn't the easiest avenue to take, as picking stuff up in the water is particularly tricky when you're floating around next to it and the object is small, and finding tiny items amongst seaweed is part of the problem too. Not only this, but when you're using your RTX (a radar screen that detects items around you), Cerys holds it so close to her face that you can't see what you're looking at, and sometimes she doesn't hold it up at all when moving forward. You can't use it on the aquajet either, meaning you have to swim slowly in order to use it.

There are also enemies in the game, but these became more of an annoyance than anything else since you can't defend against them. The game tells you early on that staying out of open water is safest, but sticking near to floor and walls still led to attacks, whether it be in or out of the subs, and there is nothing more frustrating than when a shark attacks your sub and it spins upside down and round and round.

Objectives needed to be a bit more clear in the game too, as it took us a while to find out where to go on several occasions. One such time the objective required us to scan a wall, however, we didn't know where this wall was or what we were looking for, and only after about an hour did we find where we needed to go. The one sentence used to describe objectives is often not enough to go on, and more detailed information would have helped a lot.

The biggest issue that Iron Fish has, above all of this, is that it's extremely buggy. During our hours with the game we experienced all kinds of issues, such as pieces of rock glitching out and bouncing away, clipping issues, ship damage coming from nowhere, objects popping in, and at one point we managed to swim under the map somehow. Not only this, but unfortunately our play-through was cut short by the game not allowing us to repair or get back in our submarine, meaning we couldn't proceed without the oxygen supply it provided.

In general the performance wasn't brilliant either. The pause button for the majority of the time needed to be pressed twice to work, getting out of the ship took a long time after tapping the button, the frame-rate dropped significantly at certain points, and the fish animations weren't particularly smooth when swimming. Graphically, the game wasn't too shabby. However, a vast expanse of ocean doesn't give many opportunities to show off graphical capabilities, although things like rusted shipwrecks and the submarines impressed. The lighting played a part in that too, with eerie orange flares lighting the way to dark caverns with hidden threats.

Overall, though, Iron Fish disappointed deeply due in no small part to the very poor performance and wealth of bugs we encountered time and time again. The potential for a good thriller was there in terms of atmosphere, but the issues it had weighed it down like an anchor, and it became more of a slog to play than the exciting underwater adventure we had hoped it would turn out to be.