![]() This might sound like a bit of a gripe, but in practice it’s not – it’s just a return to an older style of gameplay. Using an approach like this also allows the player time to use the special abilities of hero’s like Anna Kos, who has a snipe ability, or even the abilities of more average units like grenadiers, who can throw a grenade when commanded, but won’t do so on their own steam. When a battle was to be fought, I’d often command the infantry into the “best available” cover, then use the armoured units (including heroes on occasion) to break up the enemy forces and, if appropriate, get behind them. I found myself creating battlegroups consisting of armoured units and infantry of various kinds moving together but grouped on separate hotkeys. This is often because getting behind a mech comes with significant risk of return fire, and because infantry in particular will crawl when suppressed, making offensive movement challenging. Flanking and cover, as I mentioned, do feature, but it’s quite rare to find that a change of position mid firefight would be more effective than continuing to use the same units to keep firing. Iron Harvest feels more about ensuring that players bring the right tools to the fight in the first place, than it is about using cover or manoeuvring forces to gain an advantage. With that said, I didn’t feel like there was a ton of impactful choice about how to influence each skirmish once it had begun. ![]() Flanking and cover is at play here, and the maps are well designed to frequently allow players to take advantage. Flamers and machine guns work well on infantry, but are less effective against armoured targets, whilst larger cannons fire less frequently and are unlikely to disrupt infantry quickly enough to be considered effective. The actual combat is also relatively traditional, despite the inclusion of mechs, anti-mech weapons, flamers, machine guns and a wide variety of other ordnance that works in an almost rock-scissors-paper kind of way. Early missions (and others infrequently throughout the campaigns) give players a very limited amount of resources and demand that they be spent wisely, but these are infrequent. Most missions involve a mixture of building up troops, advancing on control points and collecting resources (iron and oil) as well as occasional stealth sections. Throughout the twenty-five hours or so that I spent with its campaigns, I felt many moments of nostalgic joy. If capturing the spirit of these games, as well as pretty much all classic RTS titles that came before it, was the goal, then Iron Harvest is a success. The PR surrounding the game speaks often of capturing the spirit of games like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War II, which both originated around the same time and occupy a space somewhere between the base-building approach of classics like Command & Conquer and the more modern, purely tactical strategy games that have been increasingly popular. Whatever thematic links between Scythe and Iron Harvest there may be, there’s no doubt that Iron Harvest has its own identity in gameplay terms. Where many RTS games keep their distance and avoid personal relationships at a per-unit level, in Iron Harvest, these relationships form a key part of the storyline and are dealt with throughout the gameplay by the introduction of hero units that come with special abilities and other unusual features. Following the war, an uneasy peace remains in place, but border disputes between The Polanian Republic and the Rusviet, whilst the Saxony Empire waits in the wings.Įach of these factions is playable across three interlinking campaigns and whilst there are some clear “baddies” and “goodies” among them, the storyline is complex and “adult” enough to allow the players room for interpretation. The Great War happened, but instead of being fought by men in trenches with little or no mechanised support, it was actually fought by those huge, hulking mechs that I mentioned earlier. ![]() Iron Harvest is set in an alternate history world in around about 1920. This artwork came from Polish artist Jakub Rozalski, and whilst the subject of today’s review, Iron Harvest, isn’t actually a Scythe branded game, there’s no doubt that Rozalski’s worldbuilding links the two in an undeniable way. Back in 2016, a board game called Scythe blew the world away with its incredibly evocative artwork, which featured hand painted images busy farmers working the fields against a backdrop of huge, mechanical walkers that seemed to eye them in equal parts both wary and protective.
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