Iron Meat Review: More Than Just Pretty Pixels

It’s been 17 years since the last good Contra sequel. It hasn’t been the same since then. While Konami is still trying to play catch-up with awful to mid Contra projects (yes Operation Galuga is just that), the indie scene has been bustling with fresh and exciting SHMUPS (like the excellent Valfaris and its sequel). Iron Meat from developer Ivan Valeryevich Suvorov and publisher Retroware is the latest side-scrolling Shoot ’em up genre. It being it my wishlist for quite a while, I jumped at the first opportunity to review Iron Meat. I went in just expecting a Contra successor and came out a grizzled veteran of an unwinnable war against a metal-devouring alien mass. Iron Meat is, simply put, one of the best indie games I have played this year. It’s more than just pretty pixels.

The Munchies

Sticking close to genre traditions, Iron Meat is fairly light on the story. But the story it does have is presented to the player through a handful of delicious pixelated cutscenes. The gist of the story is that a gross-looking alien mass with an appetite for iron escapes from a research facility on the moon. Even the shapeless meatball knows we all need friends and opens up a portal inviting all sorts of nasties to wreak havoc. The blob and its friends take over the planet in no time, warping and twisting all iron-made structures in sight. This is where our hero comes in. As Vadim, a regular soldier fated to stop the invasion, it’s up to you to push back the relentless wave of aliens (or demons?) the only way you know — several bullets (of all shapes and sizes) at a time.

The key art of Iron Meat doesn’t do justice to the amazing presentation and excellent pixel art. The world may have gone to shit, but Iron Meat finds beauty in grotesqueness. The artworks pull no punches, featuring colorful, crisp, and detailed sprites as well as gorgeous vistas as backdrops. If it wasn’t for the endless enemy spawns, I’d have stopped to admire the scenery a lot more. Despite being covered in guts and gore, each level is visually distinct, following the classic Contra formula of “throwing something new at the player every 2 minutes”. Even when a lot is going on screen, it’s easy to tell what’s what thanks to how unique each object in the game looks. There’s even a decent CRT filter thrown in for nostalgia freaks like me. Simply S-tier work!

While alien invasion is a common theme in SHMUPs, Iron Meat takes it to another level with its presentation and level aesthetics. Since the big bad eats metals (and maybe even a pinch of everything?) like candy, the levels are transformed into gorgeous butcher shops. Once-proud monuments of human innovation are forcibly turned into hideous, half-biomass-half-machine carcasses, giving birth to monstrosities beyond human comprehension. Iron Meat is able to convey these Giger-inspired ideas not through walls of text but through its visuals. Its amazing larger-than-life boss designs are another silver crown for Iron Meat. But I’ll let you experience that for yourselves.

The visuals are backed up by a thunderous music score befitting the carnage that unfolds onscreen. The loud, bombastic, and adrenaline-pumping music feels right at home in the game’s push-forward combat. Speaking of which…

Classic Redefined

Iron Meat shines in not just the visual department. The gameplay, the most important part of a SHMUP (or any game, for that matter), is simply awesome in Iron Meat. It doesn’t break any new ground (nor does it need to) or modernize the 40-year-old gameplay loop by polishing what’s already perfect to a new layer of shine. Iron Meat comprises 9 levels, each culminating in an epic boss battle and filled with a new kind of danger every 5 steps. There are three difficulties to choose from, with the major difference between them being the number of lives you get (30 on Easy, 16 on Normal, 8 on Hard).

The gameplay formula remains relatively unchanged from Contra. It even includes couch co-op on consoles and Steam Remote Play on PC. That being said, I would have loved to see a proper online cooperative mode. But I understand why it was omitted. Ivan is one guy, after all. The core gameplay loop is basically going from one end of the map to another and staying alive while doing so. Since this is an invasion and all, you’ll be bombarded with enemies of varying size and behavior from all sides. Keep moving, or die trying.

In classic SHMUP fashion, Vadim can run, jump, and shoot in eight directions with a variety of weapons, a majority of which will be familiar to Contra fans. Similar to Contra: Hard Corps, you’ll be able to carry two weapons at a time and they can be switched using the shoulder buttons. By pressing L2 and R2, players can stay in position and fire in all directions without moving (a lifesaver on Hard), a feature all SHMUPS should have. Each weapon can be powered up by collecting one more copy of the weapon and changing the color of the projectile to green (a curious choice of color). Then there is a temporary power-up that automatically fires rapid bullets in all directions for a short time. Players can also gain more lives by hitting high-score milestones. The controls feel responsive, the difficulty feels just right, and there are plenty of challenging achievements to hunt for and skins to collect. Overall, a grand time!

I’ve been going on and on about how Iron Meat is and you’ll probably be wondering, “It can’t be that good right?” Well, it is! Iron Meat nails all the things it’s aiming to be and if I have any complaints, it’s probably the amount of content present. Don’t get me wrong, Iron Meat can be played for 3-20 hours depending on your tastes. I wish for more content because what’s in the game at the moment is so good that it makes you want more. Perhaps a boss rush, more modifiers, and some QoL options like Autofire would make the game more amazing than it already is.

Real Talk

Iron Meat’s gorgeous visuals, solid gameplay mechanics, smooth controls, and a metal af soundtrack work in tandem to deliver an equally challenging and rewarding Shoot ’em Up that does way more than it needs to in order to stand out. Simply majestic.

FINAL RATING: 95/100