Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator is a manual artillery sim that hits harder than expected

Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator opens simply enough — you're standing in a small office annex inside your walking artillery unit, facing a board that lays out the firing process step by step: measure distance and bearing, calculate elevation, load the gun, rotate the cannon, fire. Easy on paper.

In practice, the inside of the Iron Nest is the size of a small warehouse, which means this walking artillery platform almost certainly dwarfs the Gustav, the train-mounted cannon Nazi Germany built to crack the Maginot Line's fortifications. Given the vintage aesthetic, every step of that firing process is going to be brutally manual — no automation, no shortcuts.

Before heading to the map table with pencil and compass in hand, there's one more thing to do: drop a vinyl record onto the player, crank the volume, and let military marching music blare out of the tannoy. It's a small detail, but it sets the tone immediately — this is a sim that wants you to feel the weight of the machine and the moment.