Ironhive is a deckbuilding, engine-builder all about building a city and surviving a dying world.
A deck- and engine-builder, Ironhive has you trading up citizens for buildings and resources to keep your city strong and to survive a dark, deadly future. While its definitely not the first game to use citizens as a key resource (see the RTS genre), combining that with the deckbuilding aspect, and the systems required to then generate the resources needed to grow. Because certain worker types aren’t guaranteed in the draw, it does feel a bit like feeding people into a grinder in order to get what you want.
Moral quandaries of people as resources aside, this creates a really interesting dynamic where you start memorising patterns through turns, remembering that you need a specific card to possibly gather a resource, to possibly convert again, before you can get your next building going. Then, suddenly, after a couple of in-game years, Ironhive suddenly gets interest in two different ways: Firstly, the wider world opens up. As with Frostpunk or even Kingdom, you gain the ability to explore the lesser world around your city, assigning people to the world beyond in order to gather resources and more. Secondly, the deckbuilding comes alive and, as elements of your city starts to upgrade, you get the chance to not just add those processes in, but permanently alter your own deck.
It’s an interesting proposition, and is a clear evolution from ‘relics’ and ‘upgrades’ in strictly card-based, run-based games, while also giving plenty of room to make the decisions to build out your city in the direction (and to the height) that you want, matter. That does, however, come at the expense of quick replayability, with — at least my impressions of it, from playing it while at GDC earlier in the year — quite a heavy tutorial and slow build-up required before the choices start feeling like your own.
While I was definitely impressed with the balance that had gone into the early stages that I’d played — with most turns coming in quite quick, and the presentation of new building options being clear and easy to navigate — it’s the visuals of Ironhive that stick hardest in my memory. The silhouette of buildings and citizens against the wasteland, the clear colours for building type and the cool yellow and orange led UI are fantastic, easy to understand and — critically, for me — convey the post-societal setting that you’re trying to build a new society in.
It’s still early days for Ironhive, but when it does launch it will do so for Windows PC.
