Iron Helix

Last updated on September 4th, 2023 at 04:19 pm

Iron Helix is a science fiction thriller that takes place in a VR world filled with danger and intrigue.

The game is set in a cold war between the human race and an alien race called the Thanatosians. The human capital ship, the Jeremiah O’Brian, is participating in a series of war games with other human ships when a technical malfunction occurs. The ship’s central computer believes that a real war has been initiated and calculates an attack on a Calliope, a Thanatosian planet resembling the human homeworlds. The ship’s crew tries to override the attack codes, but fails. The ship deploys a security robot to terminate its human commanders, believing them to be the enemy. The real worry is that the Jeremiah O’Brian carries a devastating biological weapon, the Iron Helix.

As the player, you are aboard a scientific explorer called the Indiana, the only ship in the vicinity of the Jeremiah O’Brian. The only way to stop the O’Brian is to send an unarmed exploration probe aboard to somehow stop or destroy the ship.

Iron Helix is available for Windows and has a lengthy installation process that transfers around 16 MB of sound files. The game interface is a little sparse, with the action screen making up only 1/5 of the screen. The game is played in a series of phases, with the first phase being to locate strands of DNA for three of the highest ranking officers on the ship. The second phase is to locate two video messages left by the crew before they were killed. The third phase is to destroy the Defender robot, and the fourth phase is to stop the ship.

Graphically, the ship is rendered excellently in high-res (640×480, 256 colors), which are fairly impressive even if the ‘action screen’ is very small. The sound effects are also very good, but background music is lacking. The game has been compared to “Aliens” and “Pac Man,” and the ship has an intense “Aliens” feel to it.

Iron Helix is a unique game that provides an interesting and neat experience. The game has a futuristically dark, moody atmosphere as you roam across deserted command consoles, service shafts, and even the crew’s bathrooms and living quarters. However, the replay factor is minimal, and the AI is much too weak on the easiest difficulty level.

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Iron Helix, tries to turn the industry around. It was designed during a period of time when the weaknesses of compact disc technology were being exposed; Helix’s creators at Drew Pictures decided to do something about some of those sprouting problems. DrewPix decided that one of the main flaws in most CD games is the crummy fps we get off many high resolution video images. The remedy that they came up with involved reducing the size of the view-box, where all of the first person navigation and movie clips are played. We may be grateful now for the slow-video fix that Drew Pictures has provided, but a year into the future CD drives will have become cheaper and more powerful, making the need for smaller graphical displays, obsolete.