The countries of Polania, Saxony, and Rusviet are the focus of the campaign and the three unique factions in Iron Harvest. Iron Harvest has tantalizing hints at the wider world.Iron Harvest has tantalizing hints at the wider world: How nations are run, geopolitics, recent history, and events on other fronts in the war. As an armistice settles over the continent there are many wary of war, guerillas angry at the cost of peace, and a nefarious few who would see the war begin again. Our World War 1 doesn't happen, but the mechs become agents of destruction in a delayed Great War that consumes the continent of Europe for five years. At the same time, it’s not weighed down with decades of complex lore you need to understand, and isn’t too reliant on dieselpunk cliches aside from the obtrusive presence of Nikola Tesla. Iron Harvest is set in the brilliant world of 1920+ (created by Polish Artist Jakub Różalski), an alternate history where the development of "automachine technology" revolutionizes the world with diesel-powered mechs that starkly contrast with peaceful agriculture and old-world streets. Why have wheels on your heavy machine gun when it could have eight legs? Why have a mech's cockpit on top when it could hang from the bottom? Why use explosives to propel a bomb when you could launch it from between two spinning wheels? Why indeed. The brilliant character designs, inventive mechs, and convoluted equipment are a delight. Iron Harvest is filled with unabashedly, nonsensically cool stuff for nerds. It’s bursting at the seams with ambition, as though the developers at King Art Games looked back fondly at the mid-2000s heyday of the RTS and said: "We can do that." While it might not have pinnacle graphics and sound, Iron Harvest represents something that has become all too rare for fans of the RTS, and it’s the best single-player RTS campaign I've played in years. That's the landscape of Iron Harvest: stylish alternate-history real-time strategy with modern gameplay and a detailed single-player campaign. Through it all, the stomping of a mech's piston-powered feet. The choking smoke of diesel engines, gunfire plinking off of metal, explosions throwing soldiers to and fro.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |