Iron Storm is a game where, you often have to wonder what the designers were thinking. Presumably this game was made by people who like and play games. Presumably it was beta tested. So how can you account for the mess that is the gameplay?
Why for instance, would you take a perfectly serviceable and novel premise: a world in which the Great War has gone on for decades, and simply turn it into another cookie cutter run-and-gun shooter? Why would you have stealth sections, and yet give the AI perfect aim and vision for hundreds of yards? Why allow your character to carry an absurd array of weapons and yet have to choose between an assault rifle and a rocket launcher? Why bother having a shotgun that is so ridiculously underpowered compared to everything else? This game came out post-Halflife, they should have known what they were doing. Instead you have a boring, frustrating mess of a game that is neither pretty, nor compelling in any way.
What's more, there are hundreds of niggling little details that crop up constantly to annoy you. Why, for instance, when I select a weapon, should I then have to then click fire to pull it out? Why is the weapons menu so utterly counter-intuitive compared to every other shooter out there? Why can I not select weapons while using a scope, yet still run, reload and fire with it? The game is simply put, poorly designed and annoyingly linear.
The gameplay itself is also deeply flawed. You're alone in hostile territory much of the time, and when you aren't, you might as well be given the abject stupidity of your AI companions. Which would be fine in any other game, except for the fact that even on easy mode you'll be instantly killed a dozen different ways. You'll soon get tired of being ripped apart by snipers, that once again can spot you from a hundred yards, and always have nigh perfect aim. Leaving you only moments to spot them before your health is once again stripped away. Killing all the enemies simply becomes an exercise in repeated quick loading since the stealth mechanic is useless. Kill one enemy, no matter how isolated, no matter how silenced your weapon, and alarms start blaring. It's made even worse by having the potential for a good story which is never developed. You might as well be fighting any war in any world for all the good the carefully contrived plot and setting do. The trenches serve no purpose other than to funnel your character from one place to another, allowing the game designers to skip pesky things like terrain detail in favor of ugly brown tunnels. It's a cheap, lazy product from start to finish, and what it's doing on a website called Good Old Games, is a mystery.