Iron Halls

What is Iron Halls?

Iron Halls is a first-person shooter that runs in a browser and costs nothing to play. Firstfield Games built it as a fast corridor crawl in the mold of the early-nineties shooters, and that lineage shows in the pixel art, the raycast rendering and the pace. The setup is blunt: the run begins in the gatehouse of the Iron Directorate's fortress with a pistol and a knife in hand, and ten floors stand between that gatehouse and the man at the very top.

Every floor is hand-built rather than assembled at random, so layouts can be learned and run against the clock. It launched on 28 October 2026 and plays inside an HTML5 frame, which means clicking Play is the whole install. Four difficulties sit underneath, running from Recruit up to Iron, and the game keeps working when the connection drops.

How to play

Progress follows one rule on every floor: find the keycard, open the exit, move up. That loop is what carries the run toward the man at the top, and everything else, from kills to treasure, hangs off it.

Combat rewards patience and geometry instead of charging. Doorways and pillars stop bullets, so they serve as cover for guards and for the player alike; nobody shoots through them. Searching is a habit worth forming early, because some walls move when examined closely, and one hidden floor sits behind that kind of curiosity.

Each floor closes with a tally: time measured against par, kills, secrets found, treasure, intel collected and accuracy, all folded into a grade. Optional challenges attach to floors too, including finishing without taking damage, using only the knife, or going the whole way without saving.

Controls

Movement sits on WASD, with the left and right arrow keys turning the view and the mouse handling aim. Shooting is left click or Space, and both accept a single click or a held burst. E handles using and opening doors, Shift runs, and weapons are picked with the 1 to 4 number keys or Q. Tab brings up the map, P pauses, and M controls sound.

Every key can be rebound in the options menu, so an awkward layout can be fixed before the first real fight. Aim and turn are deliberately split between the mouse and the arrow keys, which gives players a choice to make in options rather than a single fixed scheme.

On phones and tablets, touch controls appear automatically. The touch layout can be adjusted for size and sensitivity, or flipped for left-handed play, so the on-screen buttons do not have to be lived with as delivered.

Tips for your first run

Recruit is the sensible starting rung on the four-step difficulty ladder; Iron is the far end, where a single life is all you get and saving is switched off. Early floors teach the keycard loop, so use them to build habits rather than to chase a par time you do not yet know.

The floor tally rewards both speed and thoroughness, which means a fast run and a complete run score differently. Decide which one you are attempting before the first door opens.

• Use pillars and doorways constantly. Rounds stop at both, for guards and for the player, so a corner buys time to reposition.
• Sweep the walls before leaving a floor. Some of them move, and a secret floor hides behind exactly that kind of searching.
• Grab the keycard, open the exit, then go back for treasure, secrets and intel with the route already in your head.
• Save from the pause menu before a room that looks expensive. Iron difficulty removes that option entirely.
• Read the end-of-floor tally carefully: time against par, kills, secrets, treasure, intel and accuracy each feed the grade.
• Retry the knife-only challenge on a floor you already know. It changes how guards, dogs and anything from the labs get handled.

Content and replayability

Ten floors are hand-built, and the climb moves from a gatehouse through a cell block and officers' quarters, past armouries and a supply depot, into a command bunker, a research wing nobody was meant to find, catacombs and the Citadel itself. A separate secret floor waits for players who search hard enough.

The arsenal stays small on purpose: a knife, a pistol, a machine gun and a rotary gun that has to be taken from someone important. Opposition ranges across guards, officers, black-clad elites, attack dogs and things that came out of the labs. The Iron General holds Floor 6 and will not come down to meet anyone.

Records and grades exist for every floor, collectible intel carries the story, and four difficulties stretch from Recruit to Iron. Save codes move progress between browsers, so a run started on one machine can be picked up on another, and a downloaded copy can be opened locally.

Presentation and performance

The look is pixel art drawn through raycasting, the technique behind the flat, corridor-heavy perspective of the early-nineties shooters this draws on. Options cover the details that usually grate: crosshair visibility, view bob, muzzle flash and screen shake can each be adjusted, and important sounds receive captions.

An original soundtrack gives every area its own loop, and those loops pick up when the fighting starts. The whole game runs inside the browser, works offline, requires no account, does no tracking, and pulls nothing from other servers.

Anyone who wants a permanent copy can download the offline build, unzip it and double-click the HTML file to launch it without a browser session. Between the browser build and the downloaded one, there is nothing to install and no launcher to sit through.

Who should play it

Anyone who misses the corridor shooters of the early nineties will recognise the shape: keycards, par times, secrets and a knife that stays useful from the first floor onward. Score-chasers get a per-floor breakdown of time, kills, secrets, treasure, intel and accuracy plus a grade, and optional challenges such as no damage or knife only give the leaderboard-minded a reason to return.

Players on modest hardware or unreliable connections are covered, since the game runs in the browser and works offline. Phone and tablet players get automatic touch controls with size, sensitivity and left-handed adjustments.

Anyone hunting a shortcut to the top should know the Iron General waits on Floor 6 and will not come down. Anyone wanting a slow, cover-based tactical shooter should look elsewhere: the pitch here is speed, old-school pacing and a clock running against par.