It’s a Gears of War clone then, but the sort of one you’d find made by Gameloft as a mobile game, mirroring the latest AAA detail, only with touch-based controls. None of that’s helped by the poor writing, complete lack of character development and laughable voice acting the sort of stuff that makes the original Resident Evil seem like it was acted out by esteemed professionals.

Every so often you’ll encounter a little touch-based mini-game that has you attaching wires, or tuning frequencies on knobs to unlock doors, but there’s very little to the game beyond that. You might pick up a new gun a grenade launcher, or a sniper rifle. There are 11 missions for you to go through in your campaign, each essentially just another room in which to shoot enemies before moving on to the next one. There’s even a riff on the active reload, where timing your reloads puts extra ammunition in your clip. Sometimes, you’ll even roadie run between bits of cover, and face off against an oversized boss. They’ll start throwing bigger and tougher robot at you, but they’re really just larger metallic bullet-sponges. Ironfall Invasion is a cover-based shooter that has you hiding behind conveniently placed walls, desks and the like, while popping out every so often to unload a clip or two in to waves of robotic enemies. At face value, it’s not too dissimilar to Gears of War’s tales of locust invasion, and that’s hardly where the similarities end. Alien Robots have invaded Earth, and you – a hulking man in an exo suit – have to shoot at all of them to push back the invasion.

It’s got a tired, clichéd narrative to kick things off. Ironfall Invasion, from little-known, but old-hat developers VD-DEV looks to address that, with varying degrees of success. There’s a dearth of good shooters – third person or otherwise – on Nintendo’s little handheld.

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