Ironhide Game Studios is most well-known for their excellent Kingdom Rush trilogy of tower defense games, but back in February of last year they announced a new game that would be tackling a different genre: real-time strategy. We didn’t hear much news after that initial announcement until this past January when some beta footage was released, giving us a glimpse of the game in action. Then in March during GDC we went hands-on with an in-progress version of the game and thought it was shaping up quite nicely. Now, after much impatient waiting on my part, that game, Iron Marines ($2.99), has just hit the App Store a day ahead of its scheduled release date. I don’t think anyone will be complaining about getting to play this one early! Check out the official trailer for Iron Marines.

As you can see the game has a similar style to the Kingdom Rush games but instead of the fantasy settings we get this really cool and colorful sci-fi theme. Seriously, I just love the color palette used in Iron Marines, and coupled with the many troops and enemies show on screen at once it’s the kind of game I just want to stare at all day. All that staring will probably get me killed pretty quick though. Iron Marines is $4.99 and does also contain in-app purchases, but a quick glance inside the game shows that the IAP is just for buying additional currency to speed up your progress if you want and you can also choose to buy Heroes in the game with IAP, which is similar to how the Kingdom Rush games worked. Still, if you want to wait and see how the IAP factor plays out, you can find some discussion of the game in our forums, otherwise if you’ve been anticipating Iron Marines as much as I have you can just mash away at the purchase link below.