There is one unshakable rule as monumental as the laws of Newton or Kirchhoff. Giant Walking Robots Do Everything Better. There are no exceptions: be it the pastoral landscapes of the Polish hinterland from pictures Jakuba Rozalski, sequel “Robocop“, The battle of Hoth from”Star Wars“Or … a medium-handed clone Company of Heroes… Vulgarly clanking and smoking, they dragged with a heavy tread Iron harvest through the thorns of the Kickstarter campaign, allowing the most optimistic plans to collect a resounding “iron crop” of $ 1.5 million. It is hard to imagine that a strategy about the First World War without the remark “with walking robots” would have aroused such public interest. Therefore, we can only cry: “Glory to the robots!”
The long and painful agony in which real-time strategies have been for at least a dozen years makes connoisseurs of the genre eagerly catch every flash of enlightenment. They are rare, but they do happen. Then Microsoft burst on a road but short Halo Wars 2 or a pleasant reissue of some Age of empiresthen Relic will give out a brand new Dawn of war, then the series Total war change clothes again … Iron Harvest drew attention to itself instantly. The setting of an alternative history of 1920, where the battlefields are trampled by monstrous puffing samovars, literally attracted the eyes. Iron Harvest was the first video game based on the universe of Polish artist Jakub Rozalski, which we talked about in detail in a separate article… And we hope it will not be the last.
Studio King art games known for a series of quests The Book of Unwritten Tales and role play The dwarves about the everyday life of (you won’t believe) bearded dwarves. The team got in touch with the strategic genre for the first time, so it is worthwhile to immediately understand one fact – King Art Games is not Relic Entertainment, as much as they (and we) would not like it. The sources of inspiration for German enthusiasts are obvious from the first minutes – the ears of Company of Heroes and Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2 stick out from under each bump. Here, too, the fuss with the construction of the base is reduced to a minimum, and the infantry detachments are ready to obediently huddle behind any fence or sit inside the building. When we hover over the cover, we see the same yellow and green dots indicating the degree of protection and potential location of each member of the squad … even the ability to impose melee and the retreat button are present! About 15 years ago, a similar project would have been attributed to the subgenre of “real-time tactics”, but without fish and Iron Harvest “classic RTS”. There is even less fiddling with buildings, upgrades and resources than in Relic games. There are only three main buildings: headquarters, barracks and workshop. The headquarters is needed to produce the simplest infantry, and also to ignite the nerves with a screen of “loss” in the event of its sudden destruction. The barracks give birth to infantrymen of various specializations, and brand new ‘Mechs are imposingly emerging from the workshop. The functions of the Warcraft “farms” were taken over by the same barracks with a workshop, and the more there are, the more units you can release on the battlefield. Medics can also break up a field hospital to treat infantry, and engineers are always ready to spawn a bunch of bunkers on the map, build a shelter from bags, stretch a cart or poke mines.
There are practically no improvements, only one upgrade for the barracks and the workshop is available. The fight is mainly for the good old points, slowly generating two types of resources: steel and oil.
95% of the timing is devoted to dirty trench warfare. It usually starts with sluggish infantry skirmishes, which are not very impressive. Again, this is not Relic Entertainment, in terms of human brawls in terms of animation, visual persuasiveness and overall lickiness, the creation of King Art Games cannot even compete with the first Company of Heroes. Local soldiers are terribly dull, sometimes you feel like a monkey mom from the legendary Soviet cartoon. A detachment of 5 fighters sometimes cannot fulfill an elementary order to attack: three will honestly shoot towards the enemy, one will run into the obstacle, and the latter will stand and not understand what to do. The units have obvious problems finding the optimal route, and the scenery is sometimes poorly readable – sometimes you cannot visually understand what is considered a shelter, and which of these puddles is an impassable obstacle. During the battle, you often see the famous scene from “Naked Pistol 2“When irreconcilable enemies are fiercely positioning a firefight half a meter from each other. An interesting feature of the game is the ability to change the class of an infantryman in the field. Finished off a squad of grenadiers – armed the engineers with grenades. Or retrained machine gunners into flamethrowers, just picking up the equipment of a fallen squad.
