Iron Harvest Preview: Bringing Back the Classic RTS Campaign
The story seems written with a self-awareness of our own history. The characters that populate Iron Harvest know that the war they’re locked into is futile and horrible, but couldn’t be foreseen nor avoided. The Saxony campaign I played used a complex narrative structure of cutscenes, interspersed with flashbacks to the great war in the form of missions, to show how the war had changed the characters—including a hugely satisfying plot twist and a surprising character arc for Prince Wilhelm. I went into the campaign expecting some fun missions, but I got a more interesting and dramatically compelling story than I expect from most games, let alone an RTS.But story won’t carry a game on its own. The core of Iron Harvest is a mid-paced RTS similar to Relic’s Company of Heroes or Dawn of War. It’s really somewhere in between the two. It eschews out-and-out lethality in favor of combat that cares more about unit composition and positioning over split-second tactics. Some units very effectively counter others, but even the fastest times-to-kill in the game aren’t faster than you can click the retreat button. To put it bluntly, the plodding mechs aren’t asking you for Starcraft-tier reflexes.
And it works great in single-player. The missions I played had excellent level design that not only showcased the way the game works, but offered up some pretty fiendish challenge at times. Some segments gave you limited units, requiring you to be careful how much damage you took and how you deployed—and especially what weapons you brought to a fight.In Iron Harvest, infantry units can swap between roles by picking up new equipment from the ground. That can be weapons another unit dropped when killed or gear that you found in a supply cache. The levels with a limited number of units really shone once I figured out how to manipulate my units by changing gear. I swapped weapons as I went—units would grab shovels to build field defenses, defend them, then pick up grenades off the enemy dead to become grenadiers for a new offensive.
These more freeform mission segments would segue into base-building sections fairly often – either to build up and defend an area, go on the offensive, or both. Capturing resources was never too easy, and it was obvious that the AI prioritized both attacking my base and taking resource nodes for itself. In some missions, it was all I could do to survive waves of attackers as I clawed my way up the tech tree.Difficulty made the comebacks and victories all the more satisfying. I loved the final pushes in those games, as the towns I so desperately defended were literally crushed beneath the steel feet of my heaviest mechs going to obliterate the enemy’s stronghold, or capture the final objective. I’m looking forward to seeing more when Iron Harvest releases for PC on September 1.
Jon Bolding is a contributor to IGN. Talk real-time strategy games with him on Twitter at @JonBolds.