Real Time Strategy games come in all kinds of different flavors but one of my favorites has been the more tactical style approaches. You have limited units at your disposal and must position them accordingly to best defeat an enemy or face severe consequences. Games that played like this well were Company of Heroes and Dawn of War. Now a new game has entered the fray and aims to stand tall with these storied RTS’s from yesteryear, meet Iron Harvest!
Iron Harvest takes place in an alternate version of history where walking machines invented by the inspiration of Nikola Tesla changed the outcome of World War 1. The political climate of Europe has been vastly changed and the new powers are rushing to rebuild their armies and machines. There are 3 playable factions within the game, the Saxony Empire, Polania and Rusviet. Each faction will have a playable campaign with an overarching story line tied between all three!
Being a fan of RTS and alternate history games this one is right up my ally and I got to go hands on with Iron Harvest at E3 2019! In the E3 demo build I got to play my main objective was to survive 3 waves of oncoming enemies and to then destroy the enemies encampment. Being a more tactical RTS the number of units a player can have on the battlefield is limited so each slot must be used appropriately. When the demo started all slots were filled by default with a number of ground troops, a few light mechs and 2 huge artillery mechs. Infantry can be assigned to cover in trenches or behind walls to help protect them from enemy fire which I quickly had to do as the first wave came in to attack.
Combat was a blast as I would try to maneuver my grenadier infantry into position to help take out a larger mech or mortar position. I ended up failing and losing the squad a good number of times but I was soon able to get units in place to properly defend my base. Speaking of my base I ended up building a bunker near the front of my base that ended up causing both salvation and a movement headache on later waves. The mechs you get to command are huge so building a large structure in the middle of a confined space wasn’t my best idea. To my credit that bunker did end up taking out an enemy mech after my last grenadier positioned near the front died while the rest of my squad was out capturing resources. Resource gather is handled by capturing resource points on the map, the more you have the more you get!
I was unfortunately only able to spend 20 minutes with Iron Harvest so I wasn’t able to learn all of the games mechanics but I came away more than impressed and excited! Iron Harvest is expected to launch by the end of 2019 for PC with a PS4 and Xbox One Version also planned.
