Iron Gaia: Virus

Iron Gaia: Virus is like a DLC in the original meaning of the word: a short companion piece to the original game, developed afterwards to explore underdeveloped plot strands and let the developers try out new design ideas. On paper, that’s all well and good and you certainly cannot accuse Max McGee (aka Legion) of playing it safe and sitting on past successes. It’s still execution that matters the most, though, and while Virus might have been intended as a step sideways from Iron Gaia, it’s also a large step backwards.

Storyline

The best part of Virus. The game is set immediately after the (true) ending of the original, and gives player control of Slade, a fallen Celestial who was a secondary character in the original game. He needs to escape the Iron Gaia station as it has entered death spiral and on collision course with Earth, and save his friend Tom Brighton, while contending with the now-leaderless creations of Gaia and Dr. Cross, a figure from station’s forgotten past. For a while, the plot is at standstill as Slade is busy hunting for keycards, passcodes and other things, with little but errant Replicants and security robots to disturb him (more on that in gameplay). Like with the original game, it picks up soon and succeeds admirably at both expanding Slade’s character and filling in the many blanks from the original. Things like the reason for Gaia’s insanity, the formation of rebels, or, indeed, why Carter wasn’t turned into a Celestial alongside others, had all been only glanced at in the original, but are explained now. The writing remains sharp, and most dialogues are still a pleasure to read. If it wasn’t obvious already, playing original Iron Gaia is very important, since otherwise you wouldn’t understand the significance of many events and characters.

Again, it is not a perfect storyline, even when judged as on its aims as a gaiden game alone. Unlike the original, Virus lacks the out-of-place pop culture references, but it’s out-of-place swearing is hardly an improvement. Dr. Cross only occasionally transcends the generic Mad Scientist/ Dr. Mengele archetype he’s based on: it’s really rare to find anyone today actually believing that “compassion is a vestigial left-over of evolution” or that “there can be no parallel pathways of evolution” (there totally are). As you can tell from these quotes, he’s a completely ruthless, frequently emotionless figure, who’s practically irredeemable, and yet you still fail to defeat him personally in a disappointing conclusion that doesn’t resolve a whole lot. The biggest problems, however, are all to do with gameplay, which isn’t just disappointing on its own, but also drags down the storyline along with it.

Gameplay

Let’s begin with the three-hour timer. On paper, it’s a good idea, since it gives urgency to the whole process and discourages purposeful grinding. The problem is that it has no effect other than failing the game once it runs out. Characters will act exactly the same regardless of whether there are 15 minutes until the crash or 45 minutes. Needless to say, that isn’t realistic at all, but what’s worse is that it makes you dread every new plot twist or development instead of anticipating them, as it means more time spent in the accursed confines of the station. There are a few games made in the engine that pulled off divergent storylines, so it’s really not too much to ask for the story to change depending on the amount of time left during the key points. Hell, even having Slade act like he’s aware of the timer and say things if a player is spending too long at the certain plot point would’ve been a huge improvement.

To be honest, though, I could have tolerated the above flaw and replaying the game because of it, if the process itself was enjoyable. I could have had also enjoyed the way Metroidvania elements of the original are brought to the forefront: since 3 of 4 wings of the block you’re in are locked at the start, and require various cards and passcodes to open, there’s a lot of running around back and forth to get the passcodes, keycards and more, while also solving related challenges within each wing (i.e. getting a Hazmat suit to pass through a toxic area or extracting a passcode from a section of DNA). These sub-challenges can be rather creative, and more cool scenarios are introduced later on. What separates Virus from ranks of successful Metroidvanias is the way Slade often refuses to interact with items until he knows what they’re for, mandating further running back-and-forth and wasting player’s time. Equally often, when Slade does finally need something (operational switch, blood scanner, etc.), he usually just says that it must be somewhere, and rarely thinks about where it might be, thus mandating more crazed running around, made more frustrating by the implementation of combat.

In between instalments, the combat system changed from first-person with unlimited turn length to third-person with active time bars. Neither approach is inherently superior, but Virus’ battles are crippled by Slade being alone and starting with only two weapon skills, a bizarre and unexplained nerf given that he had six in the original. This removes nearly all tactics from battles; essentially, they consist of spamming Lead Hose (group attack skill) against zombies/cameras until only 1-2 are left standing. Tougher enemies, or even early bosses, are to be head-shotted or attacked with Full Auto when you get it. Winning these battles earns you Nanites, which replace both credits and XP from the first game, a change with absolutely no explanation behind it. They can be spent to purchase vital items in auto-shops, re-learn inexplicably forgotten gun skills, learn new Sigma skills, upgrading primary stats, upgrading hacking and repair skills (more on that later) and special Gifts. Managing it all is incredibly stressful at the beginning, yet is unsatisfyingly shallow near the end, which is literally the opposite of how RPG progression is meant to function.

To elaborate, you’re initially dazzled by all the options on display and have no idea what will be the best tactical option. As you get further into the game, you quickly realise that half of those skills are not needed anyway, and there are too few Nanites to waste it on them. The choice between Knee Cap and Disarm isn’t very interesting or meaningful, for instance, especially when most fights don’t last long enough to actually make them valuable. Out of the stat upgrades, Agility is the only one that changes things much, as it (mostly) prevents enemies attacking before you when maxed out. The rest are really only there if you have spare Nanite, their effects dwarfed by the randomness in every fight. Sigma feats and Special Gifts are more important, but are terribly balanced. Drain Life and Spawn Shadow are far more useful than Disrupter and Nox, since the former never drains Energy fast enough and Shadow is already capable of inflicting blindness. The Special Gifts are even worse; Move-By-Wire is a cool but misguided idea, since the block is very cramped, and battles plus various puzzles take up a lot more time than movement already. Starfall and Ascension Rage Techniques are too expensive to use outside of boss battles, and so this leaves Enhanced Adrenal Gland as an “I Win” Upgrade, since it grants health regeneration and immunity to all status effects.

It’s really difficult to overestimate just how much that upgrade changes/breaks the game. When combined with maxed-out Dermal Plating, Slade will never lose health in low-level battles again; often he walks into battle wounded and walks out healed, and skills need to be used. Battles against more advanced enemies are equally broken, as their ability to inflict status effects is essentially what sets them apart from low-level grunts. Scorpion-like things that inflict Shock are nigh-undefeatable without it, because in another bizarre change, that skill, which only lasted a single turn in the original, now disables a character for about a dozen turns, when that’s the LAST thing that should happen in one-on-one fights. Being immune to such status effects also abdicates you from needing to carry Panaceas, Sutures Kits and other such things for the rest of the game; my apologies to those of you who stocked up on them early, for that was a waste of valuable Nanite. However, don’t rush to get it at the start: you have to have cleared the Chimera Virus segment, otherwise it will override the Gland somehow when you’re infected with it. In spite of what the terminals say, you won’t get the gland restored by healing at the one-time use Regeneration Chambers.

Remarkably, the game still manages to frustrate even when the gland is working properly, because of the now-infamous cameras. Added as a replacement for random encounters alongside patrols on the map, they’re the kind of solution that only makes things worse. Random encounters are supposedly disliked for unexpectedly forcing player into combat, except that in Iron Gaia, you could nearly always flee from them. Due to that game’s difficulty, that choice felt truly meaningful, and made battles you fought in just a bit more special. Here, the Escape button might as well have been removed from the menu, since it’s greyed out 100% of the time anyway, and so you really do feel forced into combat. Each camera will always summon the same arrangement of enemies every time, and the patrols also never change in their lay-out, which makes the game feel even more stale. I once saw an article explaining the difference between input and output randomness in game design, but didn’t truly understand it until I played Virus. It cuts down on the interesting input randomness in its combat by making every given camera/patrol encounter start the same (vs. the relatively wide range of enemy groupings in the first Iron Gaia), and increases output randomness by vastly increasing the damage range of every attack and ability. When the exact same fight against two First Lines or 4 Security Turrets can be over in two turns or in five, depending purely on how much damage your attacks/abilities could inflict, you feel like it’s not you who’s winning the fights, but the invisible dice rolls.

Technically, patrols can be avoided on the map, and cameras knocked out with Chaff Grenades, but these “options” are very poorly implemented. The maps are often too small to make avoidance viable; the “chase” from mutated Nerakov, where both of you end up stuck in the corner of the hallway for about 20 seconds is the worst example. Similarly, some enemies are both faster than Slade and will unpredictably turn towards him at a set distance, again making avoidance non-viable. The Chaff Grenades temporarily knock out the cameras (and later various bombs) when used in the menu; there’s no visible timer for them, and it’s possible to run into a camera just as the field runs out, especially if they’re placed in the far corners or at the entrances, where they’re practically impossible to spot. Of course, these cameras can be permanently disabled through hacking the terminals, in what remains the worst mechanic in the game. Hacking terminals has the double misfortune of being absolutely ridiculous story-wise, with the terminals placed exactly under each camera the way no security would ever work, and making for horrible gameplay due to hacking being entirely percentage-based and out of your control. Again, the output randomness reduces player involvement in the process, and the hacking upgrades you can buy have less influence over the process than reloading and trying again.

Then, there obviously have to be consequences for failure, and so unpredictably failing the hack instantly starts another fight, one that typically has a lot more enemies than what the camera would have summoned on its own if you left the terminal alone. Apparently, they just teleport over there instantly, which again breaks the immersion; additional patrol on the map in say 10 seconds would’ve made a lot more sense. Plus, surviving the fight with the response team still leaves the camera active, and it’s possible to fail the hack, defeat response team, then walk two steps and trigger the camera you were just trying to disable. On my second playthrough I learnt that you’re better off just ignoring the terminals, smashing through turrets in the early sections of the game and stocking up on Chaff Grenades for later stretches. Ironically, the whole seems a response to complaints about the horrible hacking minigame in the original, and yet that segment was bad mainly because of the equally random nature of opening data nodes inside the simulation. In short, the right answer would’ve been to have skills used to bypass singular cameras (say, A Sigma Feat summoning a cloud of smoke), fewer terminals (about one per room/corridor would’ve been good), and a properly working minigame + Nanite boost at the end. As it is, you’re often making yourself weaker by hacking the terminals, while repairing usually removes Nanites from Slade. There are two machines which he can repair and then hack for a large sum of Nanites, but it’s really an exception proving the rule.

Before I move on, I must mention the Spider Droid assembly from parts hidden on every block. Sadly, that’s another cool idea executed poorly: You’re not told how many droid parts are needed (it’s 4), causing you to waste time running to and from work bench, hoping you can finally get a robot ally only to discover that more stuff is needed. You won’t get all parts until the tail section of the game, when Slade is likely to already have Adrenal Gland and so not really need it. There’s a choice between four types of Droid, but you’re not told of their actual differences beyond Attack, Defence, Smart and Fast. I chose Defence because I didn’t want to repair it too often, and it turned that the droid a) lacks abilities of any kind; b) cannot be controlled manually. In essence, it’s a lot worse than the Sigma Shadow you can summon as soon as you get the skill for it. Hell, I would’ve had accepted the option to recycle it for a tidy sum of Nanites, but you can’t even do that!

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

Level layout and graphics are the only areas with notable improvements over the original. The Chrono Trigger tileset does in fact look better than the default tiles, and there’s a more consistent feel to the station. There are also more interactive objects in rooms than before, and reading Slade’s comments on various broken machinery again adds to the atmosphere significantly. The combat graphics are again hit-and-miss: the new Replicant Soldiers (which fight exactly like original’s Elite Guards) and Rotting Zombies are the only ones to look a lot better than their original rendition. I suppose that unnamed purple-colored gun robots (unlike the original, Virus never displays enemies’ names, so while you can recognise some if you played the first game, others remain a mystery) and the Junior Celestials also look nice, but other changes are bizarre, with the new Fury Stingers getting the worst of it.

The combat backgrounds generally look better than they did in the first game, but are still rather unexceptional. In what seems to be a bizarre oversight, the lower third of the screen is typically completely black every time you fight, with no design elements at all, and this again gives a rather unfinished look to the game. The new “Gear”-style combat menu is lacking in functionality: it only shows Slade’s portrait and his HP, Energy and turn gauges. Thus, if you’re hit with a status effect and you miss the second-long space when the attack’s name was displayed, you’re screwed, since there’s only one “afflicted” sprite for all status effects. When there are three effects dedicated to draining health over time (Poison, Bleeding, and Burning) and all of them require different remedies, this can really end up in death.

The tracks used for the OST are technically good, again being a mix of original (?) tracks and midi versions of Nu Metal and classic game OST. Unlike some other people, I didn’t mind Coheed and Cambria songs, since they always fit the situation. "Delirium Trigger" is a superior song to “Keeping the Secrets of the Silent Earth”, and using it as the main theme is another modest improvement over the first game. However, the way music is set together is disappointing, as you’ll often run down two corridors with one track playing, then enter the next one set to a track with rather different sound and tempo, and it always feels jarring. It’s particularly notable in the main lobby: Silent Hill 2’s "True" is one of the all-time great compositions, but there’s a reason it was only used once in that game, since it loses its power as mere background music. In a final example of misplaced priorities that plague Virus, you can change battle themes and/or menu colours to one of four options through the Portable Console. It’s nice, sure, but I would’ve gladly given it away in return for any of the flaws listed above being fixed.

Conclusion

Some of you might now be glancing up at the score and wondering why it’s not lower. To put it simply, I wouldn’t have written 3000 words about this game if I didn’t care about it, and it made me care for several reasons. I really liked the original Iron Gaia and loved the setting it created. I enjoyed the way Virus’ storyline tied in with the original and expanded on it, even if the conclusion was again lacking. Some of the individual scenes are truly great; the 40's noir-styled firefight in a VR simulation is practically pitch-perfect and something I never expected to see. I can even see the intent behind every design element I criticised above, and the promise it could’ve had. However, it doesn’t change the fact that Virus is a highly disappointing game that didn’t have enough thought put into its execution and fails to live up to the original Iron Gaia. If you're a fan of the original Iron Gaia, play it at your discretion.