Given the surprising focus on establishing a narrative that seamlessly stretches throughout the entire game, Iron Harvest does a great job in making its single-player experience feel quite memorable. Every single rifle or cannon shot sounds like it has the proper amount of weight to it, and the cannons from the biggest mechs and the artillery are extremely satisfying to use thanks to how daunting they sound. Still, the sound design was also one thing that impressed me the most in Iron Harvest. Even if I moved the camera around the sound would only play on one side, which is quite irritating since it creates a disconnect between what I’d see and what I could hear. However, there was one really annoying issue that I experienced throughout my whole time with Iron Harvest, which was the fact that any voice lines would only play on one side of my headphones, with that side being the side corresponding to where the unit speaking was located in relation to the camera. Despite not disliking the English voice acting, I played the game with the native voices because it simply makes the game much more immersive and convincing for me. On that note, one thing that I really appreciate about Iron Harvest is the fact that you can choose to play the game either with English voice acting or with native voice acting for each of the factions.
The campaigns feature fully voice-acted cutscenes between each mission, and there’s also plenty of dialogue during missions and sections with close-up camera angles that really give the game a cinematic feel. While sometimes they’d hang back and try to attack my units with long-range units, other times it felt like they’d just throw whatever they had at my units, even going as far as having infantry right next to my mechs. Still, although I played on medium difficulty, I felt like the enemy AI was either hit or miss. The easiest one is fit for people who only want to enjoy the story, then there’s the default experience mode, which strikes a good balance in terms of difficulty, and then there’s the hardest mode made for RTS veterans. In any case, you can also play the game in one of three difficulty modes, each made for a specific type of player. The multiplayer side never appealed to me. With that said, I pretty much only play RTS games for the campaign. Like most classic RTSes, Iron Harvest not only features 3 fully fledged single-player campaigns, but it also supports AI skirmishes, ranked and quick matchmaking in 6 maps, as well as 3 faction specific challenge scenarios where each faction must dig in and defend a set of objectives against overwhelming enemy waves. It’s in this context that the game’s single-player campaign takes place, as players get to experience this version of history from three different angles. The war that was supposed to end all wars ended up not being the last, thanks to Nikola Tesla’s inventions, which, despite seeking to only work for the betterment of Humanity ended up becoming devastating weapons and sparking an arms race for which the nation could have the most powerful mechs in their army. In Iron Harvest’s alternate version of history, after the Great War, there were three nations that saw themselves enveloped in yet another major conflict, the Polania Republic, the Rusviet Union, and the Saxony Empire. Both in terms of art-direction and world-building, the game is tremendously engrossing and believable. With that said, there’s also a lot of inspiration drawn from the dieselpunk and Steampunk genre, and the Polish-Soviet War, and so the world of Iron Harvest is pretty astounding as a whole. While the game takes place in a unique alternate history universe, Iron Harvest’s gameplay is undoubtedly inspired by classics such as Company of Heroes and Dawn of War. Although the game itself is being made by this studio, the actual universe of Iron Harvest, also known as 1920+, comes from the mind of Jakub Rózalski, a polish artist whose art also originated the popular board game Scythe. The developers, KING Art Games, are mostly known for their The Book of Unwritten Tales series, but it seems that didn’t stop them from setting out to make such an ambitious RTS. Iron Harvest is a game that ran an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign back in March 2018, where, despite having a goal of $450,000, it ended up raising a total of almost $1,300,000.
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