![]() What set them apart are their hero units, including Polania’s Anna and Wojtek, but more significantly, their pool of dieselpunk war machines. With these resources, you can upgrade your structures to produce more expensive, but powerful, units.Īll three factions share similar human units: your typical spread of grenadiers, machine gunners, medics, engineers, and more. Other units should be sent off to do battle and level up, and capture oil and iron sources - the game’s primary resources. Base building falls on the engineers, who can also build up barricades, defenses, and repair mechs. Players start out with a small number of resources and units for their headquarters, their barracks for human units, and their workshop for mech units. ![]() The classic loop is, as you can guess, present and unchanged in Iron Harvest. With 21 missions and 21 cutscenes across three campaigns and factions, the single player in undoubtedly Iron Harvest’s highlight.īuild a base, spawn units, gather resources and win fights, and upgrade - rinse and repeat. Iron Harvest’s campaigns are well paced, keeping me playing mission after mission without much burnout. What’s important to note is that nothing overstays its welcome. Many take you away from building up your base and towards more interesting mechanics, like stealth. The two following campaigns, Rusviet and Saxony, introduce even more variety into the mix. The Polanian campaign doubles as a tutorial for the game, introducing you to all the tools at your disposal, and all the tricky situations where you might find yourself. The story of Iron Harvest remains easy to follow, with characters you care for on and off the battlefield. Doubly so given the very impersonal nature of RTS, where you typically control countless faceless units from above. The game deserves praise for representing such a grand story with so many moving parts through a very intimate lens. The Polanian Republic is up first, introducing you to Anna Kos and her bear, Wojtek. Unfortunately, as the campaigns is entirely linear, you cannot start with the faction of your choosing. Every campaign features seven lengthy missions with cutscenes interspersed between them. The meaty single-player mode is broken up into three faction campaigns, each one continuing where the previous left off. It’s the unmasking of this organization that unites the heroes of the game’s three factions: the Polanian Republic, the Rusviet Union, and the Saxony Empire. It sees a post-Great War Europe, dipped in dieselpunk aesthetics, on the brink of yet another war - courtesy of a shadowy cabal and its influential members. Iron Harvest finds its setting in Jakub Różalski’s alternate-history 1920s, something it shares with the popular board game, Scythe. You quickly forget what’s missing, and commit yourself fully to the joyous process of obliterating bases. The game is a smart, community-led celebration of RTS, and a love letter to the games that captivated so many gamers. But, King Art Games is helping to revitalize the sub-genre in its own way. Presently, it lacks the complexity of the sub-genres favorites, and is without any true novelty or innovation. It’s anybody’s guess whether or not Iron Harvest can grow into a game capable of dethroning RTS’ aging titans. Age of Empires II, StarCraft II, and Company of Heroes 2 continue their lengthy reign, while newcomers seldom do more than kick up a bit of dust. But despite its perceived prominence in today’s space, some say the sub-genre has plateaued. Decades of virtual battlefields scarred by bullets, stained with blood, and seared by bombs. Decades of commanding armies, both large and small, in a struggle against impossible odds. And conquer it did RTS has since grown into a goliath of a sub-genre. Four decades ago, real-time strategy put down its roots in preparation for its conquest of the strategy world.
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