Real-time strategies have become rare guests on our street, which is why each release attracts the attention of a small but demanding group of people, including yours truly. What the game is and how it has changed in the first weeks after release is below… Well, or above, that’s not the point -_-
The beginning of September turned out to be fruitful for strategy: as many as two games. But if the third part of “Kings of the Crusaders” needs no introduction, with “Iron Harvest” everything is slightly different. Standing somewhere between Company of Heroes and Dawn of War II, it is a representative of the dying real-time strategy genre that is still waiting for its renaissance.
The people responsible for the development of KING Art are not new to the industry, and Iron Harvest is not the first work they went to Kickstarter with, but it is their first strategy, so there were reasons for concern. As it turned out, not unreasonable.
Artistically, the game belongs to the not very popular “diesel-punk” family, so it’s not tanks that are cutting through the fields of an alternative First World War, but automatons – manned walking vehicles. The inventions of the brilliant engineer Nikola Tesla, conceived to make people’s lives easier, found a much more mundane application in the hands of the military. In the crucible of war, everyone is equal, but the plot highlights three countries, whose difficult relations it is dedicated to.
These are such cute “archive” shots. It’s a pity there are few of them.
Polania (read Poland) did not emerge victorious in the conflict and was forced to sign a humiliating peace treaty legitimizing the military presence of another state on its territory. Every month, local residents are becoming more and more accustomed to the occupiers, and not everyone is happy with this.
Rusvet is going through hard times. Internal problems – the plight of the lower strata of the population, general dissatisfaction with the protracted conflict – threaten to completely destroy the authority of the already not the most skillful emperor. You understand that when a ruler in the midst of an attack by revolutionaries is called a “good man,” this means that there is nothing more to praise the politician for? What’s worse, a mysterious group of powerful individuals is adding fuel to the fire of the coming uprising. Truly a troubling era.
Saxony is prosperous. Saxony is strong. Saxony is defended by one of the world’s most renowned tacticians… But the chancellor’s age is taking its toll. Having underestimated the scale of the war before it began and getting bogged down in it in recent years, he left the internal affairs of the country and the upbringing of the heir to their own devices. And now women are going to be given the right to vote. For now, the fatherland is safe, but its future is already uncertain.
With such an heir, you don’t have to worry about the future of your homeland. It’s true?
So… it could be. Whether fortunately https://europa777casino.co.uk/ or unfortunately, the synopsis foreshadowing political vicissitudes and civil wars becomes the foundation of a story about the struggle of several heroes (on each side) with an evil organization that is shaking the pipe of world stability. A matter of taste, of course, but personally I’m a little sorry to see the potential of a good military-political drama going on a different track. Although, it was probably a mistake to expect serious cabbage soup from a game with a kind bear-doctor and a riding tiger from the very beginning.
Nevertheless, the plot is rather the strong point of the game. Let it be written without revelations, but also staged without any mistakes. All three campaigns combine into a coherent story, which, to my great surprise, almost succeeds in that legendary gray morality. Hold on, in general, the evil Rusvetsky Ivan is still the most evil and the most Rusvetsky, but now we are not the only ones stained with war crimes. The use of civilians, the execution of prisoners and the spraying of chlorine – for once Russia is not the center of universal evil. And although one can argue about the context and root causes of events, such a line of thought among the scriptwriters is already progress.
The gameplay is… not so good. From the first minutes of the game, the influence of the already mentioned “CoH” and the second “DoW” is visible: automatic collection of resources when capturing deposits, influence points for holding the corresponding points, infantry hiding in houses and behind barricades, another symbolism instead of a base (only two buildings plus a pillbox!). This in itself is not a bad thing; again a matter of taste. There are also a couple of our own solutions, such as equipment falling from killed infantry, which another unit, ours or someone else’s, can pick up and change its class to the appropriate one. The problem… The problem is in the details.
In a second, the useless engineers in the north will turn into armor piercers.
The same bugs at the start, where can I get rid of them?? They are not critical, but the devils are unpleasant. The barracks and workshop selection hotkeys regularly fail to hell, so you have to hover over tiny icons with the mouse or break away from the battle and move the camera to the base. Or the order of flipping through units breaks down, which, however, was rare. My personal favorite is focusing the camera on a single press of the squad key, and not two, as it should be. Incredibly infuriating. And in one of the story cutscenes the voices of the voice actors completely disappeared. And they never returned (they returned -_-).
Their sense of proportion has not returned to the developers either. Some story missions present… unpleasant surprises. For example, anti-aircraft guns from the Polansky campaign, capable of halving your army in one unexpected shot. Or the last mission of Rusvet, in which the enemy receives endless reinforcements, appearing at several points on the map, the control of which and advancement are limited by an extremely modest limit of troops. I’ll just keep silent about the protractedness of the Saxon stealth mission… No, I won’t keep silent: moving a clumsy and slow AT-AT with a diesel spill over a huge map for more than an hour is not the most exciting thing, my word to you! These moments don’t exactly break the game or make missions impassable – they just leave an unpleasant aftertaste.
And, damn it, a queue for recruiting troops, combined with a list of ready troops. And the list itself! Tiny! All units do not fit into it, you have to SCROLL. I want… to shake hands with that deep space explorer who thought such a list was a good idea. And don’t let go. And a lot more to do.
On the Internet, large armies are rarely reached, but in the story campaign the size of the armies regularly outgrows the modest capabilities of the list that is always hanging at the bottom.
But if there’s anything I have no complaints about, it’s the picture. Especially the part about furs. Detailed and beautifully animated, these tins are a source of great aesthetic pleasure. Expanding nozzles, ejected cartridges, moving their mechanical legs… The infantry also runs, jumps and shoots quite vigorously, but it was the automatons that they worked on the best. Even the story videos are not made at all shamefully. I would like to say the same about the original music… but there is simply not enough of it. The battle marches of Polania and Rusvet from the main menu are good, but in the game itself the compositions are inexpressive. The best thing that can be said about them is: they don’t distract.
Alas, much the same can be said about AI. The story missions are the same – the forces there are initially unequal, but in skirmishes its true face is revealed. The crooked, stupid face of a creature who has absolutely no idea where he ended up. All one-on-one battles are a beating. An unarmed, hapless "Ishnik" churning out engineers in a desperate attempt to grab resources, and you should be ashamed of every platinum medal taken from the poor. He can offer resistance only in group battles… provided that you have cut your troops’ health by half and taken away from your partner those crumbs of aggression that he still has on high difficulty.
Multiplayer will save the day, but only in one case: players will give the developers enough time to saturate the game with content. At the moment, there is little in Iron Harvest: few cards, few units, active abilities and, as a result, few tactics. Diversification doesn’t matter either. The ability to pick up the weapons of the dead has backfired: the infantry of the factions is almost identical. Yes, basic shooters vary in range and tempo of attacks; yes, in the network and skirmishes only Rusvet can hire flamethrowers, Polania can hire machine gunners, and Saxony can hire medics; yes, they have different exoskeleton units and heroes. But almost all of this is at the level of “a number here, a number here”.
In dynamics, the work of the Rusvet "Nagan" looks very good.
The same, oddly enough, applies to furs. If human units are not easy to make fundamentally different, then machines – here it is, space for imagination! In fact, we have an infantry killer, a vehicle killer, artillery and an ultimate, plus or minus the same for each side. I’m exaggerating slightly, there are differences. The same walking guns of Saxony require deployment and hit at a much greater distance than their competitors, and the Rusvet “Anvil”, instead of pinpoint shots, covers the entire area with rare but very powerful missile salvoes… But the role is the same. I doubt that anyone seriously expected Blizov-level factions from the Kickstarter project, but the Germans from KING Art didn’t even try.
Plus active skills, which not every unit has yet and are unlocked only with experience, are almost always pure damage: we shoot faster, we narrow the coverage radius to strengthen the weapon, we fire a rocket. This is such an inventive war. The developers threw all their efforts into the story mode, it shows. And it turned out to be quite cheerful: here we are gathering scattered loyalist forces on the streets of St. Petersburg, here we are accompanying an armored train, saving civilians in a battle-torn city and at the same time defending a shelter with almost no resources, repelling waves of enemies and… accompanying Brunya to her destination, so that her designer would sneeze in his sleep. There are practically no missions in the game like “here is your base, here is the enemy’s base – hit”. Whether it’s enemy reinforcements, saving an ally, or limiting resources, something adds spice to every mission… But that’s not why they love strategies.
In large-scale battles with a lot of effects, frames deign to sag.
This time I turned my slowness in work into an advantage. The main problem of the game is the start that is poor in content, in contrast to which the developers rolled out a “road map” with, sorry, maps, co-op, codex and ranked games. I still remember the mistake I made in one of my first reviews. As it is now before your eyes: on the monitor there are stills from “Dawn of War III”, and I urge you to give the game a chance and wait for modes, maps, stories. The end you… may remember. It’s quite unpleasant to step on the same rake, and this is a great chance to justify your own laziness by planning to wait.
In short, for now the Germans didn’t lie and rolled out the supplements according to schedule. Two team cards, story co-op, balance changes, ratings, codex – get it, sign it. And although the code turned out to be not very informative, the overall picture is still pleasing. The developers’ loyalty to their word, the slow pace of battles, which additionally punishes mistakes, the setting, the focus on the plot and the gameplay itself really appeal to me. If only they brought in unique units.
Good bear in its natural habitat.
In the long term, KING Art’s lack of ambition or resources may still undermine their efforts, but the experience of the first weeks is positive. I hope the September “road map” will not be their last: the genre is already sad enough to lose another project. “Age of Empires IV” will still have a long wait, and besides, “Relics” are not on the horse now. Such things. Don’t let the Ogniv duo burn down your headquarters and don’t take the prince in the cartoon. For today Shin is off.