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[PC] Iron Harvest

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    [PC] Iron Harvest

    King Art Games dropped the newest beta of Iron Harvest on Kickstarter backers, so I gave it a go. The beta is quite complete, featuring single player skirmishes, online multiplayer, and a some story campaign missions with cinematics and voice acting.
    It's quite a complete package for a beta, there aren't any major bugs (like game crashes or major graphics glitches), but small imperfections are present all over the game.

    Iron Harvest is the real-time strategy version of Scythe, focusing on squad-based combat. If you've played Company Of Heroes, you'll immediately know how to play: almost every part of the scenery acts as cover for infantry, and such cover can be destroyed by the various mechanized units every faction has. There are two kinds of resources, iron and oil, which are collected by scavenging crates scattered around the map or by capturing extraction points.

    The campaign stars Anna, a red-haired Polanian girl that looks like straight out of that famous Jakub Rozalski: she even has a bear on her side. Voice acting isn't the greatest, and the story doesn't sound particularly original, and the bad guy is a bit too "mustache-twirling" in some scenes. It's enjoyable, and a decent backdrop for the various missions.
    Mission themselves might be a bit too long for their own good, and it really feels playing a steampunk version of Company Of Heroes, in both offensive and defensive situations. Even the rhythm of resource collection, unit building, and combat feel like Relic's game.

    The bugs are nothing major, once a prop in a cutscenes was pure purple, one mission objective never got updated after loading a save, and cutscene dialogues start before the visuals have faded in.
    Graphics could use a bit of tweaking during cutscenes, and performance is good enough, though there are some framerate dips even when the situation is not all that chaotic.
    Interface could use some working, it gives the impression you have a limited number of units available but in fact you can build as much as your manpower allows, and scrolling through selected units to activate special actions is a bit of a pain.

    Still, it's fun and a competent real-time strategy game.
    Last edited by briareos_kerensky; 10-09-2020, 15:17.

    #2
    Full game's out, so here are some impressions.
    Compared to the latest beta, nothing much has changed in terms of interface or how the game plays. Performance went up a bit, units use their special abilities more reliably, and autocasting has been introduced for some actions. Random visual errors have been corrected, but cutscenes are the same as before: animations aren't perfect and the English dubbing is a bit flaky...if you like the idea, you can turn on native speech, which replaces English voices with Polish/Russian/German dubbing based on the faction. I actually like native speech more, it feels more natural for a lot of characters, but you need subtitles to understand the story and you need to get used to in-game audio cues you probably won't understand.

    Unfortunately the progress accrued during the beta for everything (single player campaign, user profile, unlockables, etc) is gone, and there are only a token of skirmish/multiplayer maps available; more are on the way, but what's on the roadmap will probably bring the total to 10. There are three fully playable factions: Polania, Rusviet, and Saxony, and for those who have played the campaign in Scythe, Iron Harvest takes place around the same time as the original board game. The single player campaign is mostly played from Polania's perspective, but a few missions do place other factions under your command, if even with just a selection of hero/story relevant units rather than full-on base building.

    Iron Harvest is highly reminiscent of Company Of Heroes in its structure: there are two resources, iron and oil, which are automatically produced by resource points across the map; the more resource points you control, the faster you build up resources. You cannot fortify the points themselves but you can build defences around them, but these are incredibly expensive for their performance against advanced units, so it's better to invest money in mobile units.
    Infantry is built in squads and are reinforced at the base; infantry have a morale bar, not as prominent as CoH, and every unit, including mechs, can be ordered to retreat to the base, ignoring all opposition and not accepting orders until regrouped; they will also choose the shortest path to the base, so the command must be used sparingly.
    Mechs are built one by one, and while infantry is similar between factions (riflemen, grenadiers, medics, mechanized, flamethrowers, machine gunners), mechs vary greatly between factions. Polania has a mix of fast- and (very) slow- moving mechs with a few siege units, Rusviet is all about offensive with slow but well-armoured units with a lot of different weapons, and Saxony...still have to play with them.

    There are only a few structures to be built: HQs, barracks, and workshop for producing units; sandbags, barbwire, mines, and bunkers (with no automated weapons, automated machine gun, and automated cannon) for defence. Barracks and workshop can be upgraded to get access to more powerful units and increase army size. Armies tend to be focused on a small number of units with different abilities that you have to do your best to use in order to win, rather than simply A-moving (or in Iron Harvest's case Z-moving) your way to victory.
    Units gain ranks that unlock some special abilities: for example only elite engineers can build cannon bunkers, and some of the larger mechs gain defensive abilities to shore up their weaknesses.

    In the single player campaign, you forget about infantry (if not for exoskeletons) once you get mechs because the AI mainly uses those to attack, and even specialised anti-mech infantry can barely scratch some of the more massive units; most mechs come with explosive weapons that not only allocate damage but also scatter infantry, effectively rendering them useless for a few seconds; reload times are long on the most powerful weapons (at times painfully so), but larger mechs hardly work alone.
    Due to this, most single player missions are rather slow-paced as it takes time to gather resources for mechs, and if you dare to venture around the map without proper armour support, infantry is highly likely to get mauled. The larger units also are very slow, and you need them to counter what the AI throws at you, so base-building missions drag a bit too much.
    Iron Harvest is at its best when it focuses on one or two heroes and a small number of accompanying units, as you can focus on using of their special abilties and think a bit more about positioning and how to attack enemy positions.

    Graphcally the game is nice, with a lot of attention given to environments and mechs; infantry doesn't look as good as the rest, with a cleaner look that often strides with the more weathered appearance of the rest of the world. Buildings crumble nicely when larger machines crash through them, and the various particle effects add the right visual feedback to explosions, smokes, and fire. The game makes use of pre-rendered cinematics, which unfortunately show compression artifacts and a distinct difference between the real-time game. They also look worse than the game at full detail despite using in-game assets, I wish there was an option to force all cutscenes to be in real-time.

    Still have to play multiplayer, but I doubt I will...Iron Harvest doesn't look like a game built for that, and it's more of a single-player experience, which I'm perfectly fine with.

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      #3
      Thanks for the detailed impressions Braireos, pretty much covered everything there. Will pick this up at some point as I'm a fan of Sythe.

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        #4
        Single player campaign completed. Overall a very pleasing RTS, but I can't shake the feeling IH would have been even better 10 years ago. The overall progression, game rhythm, structure, unit balancing, and special abilities, are all well made but kinda dated. The campaign doesn't quite allow you to turtle through missions but it's not as lean as what Blizzard did for the single player campaign in StarCraft II. However the campaign in IH feels more meaty and demanding than SC2's, as missions aren't simple introductions to a new unit you need to massproduce and A-move your way to victory.

        The IH campaign starts in Polania, the moves to the Rusviet side, to end with Saxony. I enjoyed playing with the latter two much more, Rusviets have two incredibly powerful heroes and mission have many more choke points you can focus your defences on, and Saxony have an eclectic mix of direct- and indirect- fire units and their maps are design to take advantage of this.
        Polanian missions are a bit more unique (like escorting a railway artillery piece you can use to stave off attacks) but I can't quite get around their units, they are either not powerful enough or way too slow for my liking.

        About faction balancing, standard infantry is shared among all 3 nations; exoskeletons and mechs vary greatly between them. I really liked coordinating Saxonian strikes, with heavy walkers luring the enemy in and acting as an anvil while their artillery unit pound opposition to scrap perched on a crest well away from harm.
        Rusviet is great for the exact opposite, a bunch of brutally specialised units that make short work of their intended opposition; they have long-range support units but are slow, and their exoskeletons are I think the only unit that can be reinforced on the fly with paratrooper reinforcements.
        Polanian should be about hit-and-run tactics, especially against other mechs, but I feel that maps don't quite allow for their agile units to circle more cumbersome opposition.

        An updated about stability: I had the game crash twice in the thied and fourth Saxonian missions, then an update happened and while the crashes are gone, I've got some rendering errors with polygons stretched all across the screen in a couple of maps; didn't make the game unplayble or unstable, but surely it was strange to see that kind of error when the rest of the game didn't have none.

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