Nice to meat you!
Have you ever booted up a game and immediately thought to yourself “Wow, this is really freaking rad”? Yeah, this is exactly how I felt when I first played Iron Meat. It feels like just about every gamer from my generation has a fondness for the Contra series. Ever since the PS2 era, Konami has been hammering out new games, with none of them really reaching the pinnacle of the classic series. In its stead, lots of indie developers, most of whom are from my generation in fact, have been attempting to hammer down that feeling. Lots have come close, but this latest effort from Ivan Valeryevich Suvorov and Retroware is easily the closest it has ever come. If Konami was smart, they would hire this team to make the next Contra game, because this is simply sublime.
So, as you can imagine Iron Meat is a run and gun game in the same mold as Contra. The story revolves around a scientist working on an experiment on the moon, things go bad, monsters come through a portal. Sound familiar? Well, it is mostly just an exposition to justify shredding hundreds of meaty monsters. Players assume the role of a random soldier and off we go to gib all the bad guys into lovely meat piles.
Just look at those glorious sprites.
MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PlayStation, Switch, PC
Price I’d Pay: $19.99
As mentioned, this is a pure run and gun. It can be played with one or two players locally and the idea is to plow through a series of stages and defeat the bosses at the end. There are three difficulty levels to choose from, and from what I could tell this only affects the number of lives you are given to complete any stage. These reset after each stage, so don’t worry about draining them all in stage one and having none left after. This is awesome as it gives just about anyone a chance to complete the game. It saves after every level so you can come back later to clean them up and of course run them again to get better. This is not a long game, so replay is where most of the play time comes from.
I do wish there was more incentive to keep going back though. There are levels to be gained, but all they seem to do is unlock new skins for your generic soldier. These are neat, but not a massive driving force that kept me coming back. Thankfully the game play takes care of that part.
This game plays like a dream. It works the same as a Contra game where you run left to right mowing down enemies along the way. It has an eight-way shooting system, and you can hold a shoulder button to stand in place and shoot in any of those directions. You can carry two weapons at a time and swap between them. Picking up the same icon you have equipped will also upgrade the weapon for more damage. Most of the weapons are great, but much like Contra I prefer the faster ones. The spread shot equivalent here is my preferred choice. Every once in a while, I would also pick up a power-up that shoots in 12 directions at once. This is really cool, but not common.
Co-op is simply a blast.
Visually the style of this game is chunky goodness. The pixel art and sprites are fantastic. Each enemy explodes into piles of gore, and it is just so over-the-top that I never got tired of it. The enemy variety is also fantastic, especially the bosses. There are some full-screen monstrosities here that rival Konami’s classic foes. The game features some great parallax scrolling and rotation that reminds me of stuff from the SNES era. The music is outstanding. It has a standard rock-inspired soundtrack from darkman007 which is amazing. There is also a retro chiptunes option for those that prefer it. I switched back and forth between them, simply because they were both amazing. The game runs at a locked 60fps and even has a CRT filter for those that want some classic pixel blurring.
Iron Meat is an amazing Contra-like that does some things better than the game it is impersonating. I cannot recommend this title enough for fans of that style. It has a rocking soundtrack, outstanding visuals, and perfect controls. Now if you will excuse me, I have some more meat to grind.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
