There is a back story to Iron Phoenix, but perhaps a better story is of a game that had a promising premise and a good idea behind it but ultimately had its reach exceed its grasp. The idea of a 16-player fighting game that can be played via linked consoles or online was a good one. It could have been the step beyond 2000’s four-player Power Stone 2 on the Dreamcast, but what it turned out being was a bit of a messy button-masher.
As Iron Phoenix opens, we are told of a giant meteor that crashed in ancient times, with a glow that resembled a Phoenix, or bird in flames. The meteor fractured into nine pieces of iron. Because of the iron and the strange glow upon its impact, the meteor became known as the Iron Phoenix. A great weapons smith found the iron and forged weapons of great power from them. Just as the smith finishes the last blade, he is murdered and the weapon stolen. Over the years it became clear the weapons bestowed great power and victory on those who wielded them. Many tried to possess all the weapons to wield their ultimate power. However none of that has anything to do with the game you’re about to play if you just bought Iron Phoenix.
That’s right, after all that setup there is no epic quest to collect all the Iron Phoenix weapons and wield their ultimate power. As a matter of fact, there is no real single-player game to speak of at all. There are five modes of play in Iron Phoenix. In each the player may choose to play offline against CPU-controlled opponents or online against human opponents. To repeat, there is no real single-player campaign mode at all.
Iron Phoenix offers a solid tutorial to teach the player the basics of the gameplay. How to perform such nifty moves as running on walls, basic fighting skills, advanced fighting combos, use of items and exchange of items between team members and switching weapons are all adequately imparted to the player. You’d better get it in the tutorial too, because the game offers you no place to hone those skills. Without any kind of quest to ramp the player up into his skills and no dojo-like arena to practice in, the player is left with just taking on CPU opponents to work it all out. The closest thing to a mode for practicing in is the offline deathmatch with the number of opponents turned down to two and set on easy. Even then the CPU’s bots are not going to just let you set up a move and wail on them. It is a major shortcoming in the game.
At the beginning of a game, the player chooses to play as one of the 10 available character models. Each has varying values for agility, attack and defense. He then may selects one of the nine Iron Phoenix weapons to equip himself with. The weapons have various ratings for range, speed and attack strength. When you figure out that there are 16 possible players in a game and only nine supposedly one-of-a-kind Phoenix weapons for them to wield, we may get a clue as to what all the fighting is really about: these guys are slugging it out to determine which are the nine true Phoenix weapons and which are knockoffs picked up at a tourist store during their last trip to Hong Kong.
The main four fighting modes of Iron Phoenix are played in arenas with different themes. The limits of the game immediately become apparent when close to the maximum number of possible players gets into a match. First off everyone tends to gravitate toward the center of the playfield. With that many characters all together it becomes very hard to pick your character out from the mass of wildly-flailing humanity. Considering that more than one player may be using the same character you are, it gets even harder. Add into that the frame rate drop that occurs with all those fighters together at once and it is looking rather bad. Further realize that hesitating to carefully consider strategy and your next move will get you severely damaged in the crossfire, and what you have is a situation that rapidly degenerates into a furious button-mashing furball with little real thought of what you’re doing.
The four main play modes mirror in many ways a first-person-shooter game. There is deathmatch in which it is every man for himself. Team deathmatch has teams vie for the most kills on the opposing team. VIP is a capture-the-flag-like game in which one member of each team is designated the team leader and the first team to kill the opposing leader wins. Giant is sort of like the Juggernaut variation of Halo where one or two players are transformed into formidable giants that the remaining players must then kill before the giants reach their victory conditions.
The final mode of play is a tournament style game where players battle one-on-one in a series of fights with the winner moving on to challenge other opponents on his way to the top circle of competition. In between the rounds he plays, the gamer may watch other fights going on to observe the fighting technique of his upcoming opponents.
Graphically the game is decidedly sub-standard, especially for an Xbox game this late in the system’s lifecycle. By this point every game should at least look great. Iron Phoenix’s characters and environments are only so-so. The frame rate issues keep the animation from ever really looking adequate. The audio is better than the visuals, but even they are nothing to write home about.
In the end analysis the game just does not hold up. The broken frame rate makes it difficult to control and it just can’t deliver on its promise of a massive online fighting game. It gets a little extra in the score for trying something different, but even that can’t save it from mediocrity. Give it a rental if you must try it. I’d do it soon though or you won’t find anyone to play online with. I have a feeling it won’t have the longevity of the better Xbox Live games.
