The Stack

Iron Storm level 5 takes place entirely on a train — a huge and fantastical Snowpiercer-style one, which you traverse back to front, making you way through cars devoted to different purposes, like a barracks car and a hospital car and a chapel car. We’re well out of the realm of the real now and barreling towards Berlin.

It’s another stealth level, or semi-stealth, anyway. You have a silenced pistol this time, letting you pick off soldiers unseen, one by one, and take their stuff. There are automated turrets linked to an alarm system, and if you can get through a car without anyone triggering the alarm, that’s great. But there’s also the (frequently unwise) option of just going in guns blazing and turning the alarm off when you can — or even just bolting for the next car, as the alarm systems aren’t linked. I tried to stealth it as much as I could, but wound up in a lot of pitched firefights anyway. I strongly suspect there are tricks I simply missed.

Of course, sometimes you have to climb out of the train and onto the roof, because how can you have a train sequence in a war story where that doesn’t happen, although various things prevent you from just running all the way to the locomotive that way. The exterior nighttime scenery rushing by is pretty nice. Eventually you also have to backtrack a bit, going through cars you’ve already cleared, which, on your return, now have newly-erected barricades, forcing you to take alternate routes over the roof or through vents or something. This strengthens my impression that there were additional stealth routes I could have taken all along, if I had noticed them.

You ultimate goal here is a special high-security room containing a case with samples from the lab in level 4. So secure is it, I had to hit up a walkthrough. There are these two turrets pointing right at the case, and there’s no cover on the way there, and try as I might, I couldn’t find the off switch. Well, it turns out that, despite the failure of my earlier attempts at destroying turrets (which occurred as early as the trenches), turrets aren’t completely indestructible, just highly damage-resistant. If you can get into its blind spot and pump a few dozen rounds into it, it goes limp. I feel like I might have done some things differently if I had known, but when I think about it, I honestly can’t think of another place where it really would have made a difference.