Iron Harvest Open Beta testing This game might be a blast!
0Although RTS games seem to be a relict of the past, some developers come up from to time to time with ingenous ideas. That is the case of Iron Harvest, a game that will be soon released and now is available for free as part of open beta on Steam.
You control one of the three nations that are to reflect European nations from the period of 1920+: Soviet Russia, Prussia, and Poland. The only difference is that they have mechs... but those aren't your usual Japanese-like mechs, they are fantastically designed and fit perfectly into the game theme, with all the brick buildings and rural areas. As for everything else, this is your typical RTS game with unit and hero progression and a strong story-based campaign.
In the first campaign (for the first side of the conflict), you follow the story of Anna Kos and her BEAR (named Wojtek) and command soldiers of Polania (the alternative reality version of Poland). I must say that the game is pretty unusual from the very beginning. The tutorial "mission" really took me off-guard. It was very unique for an RTS game. Every next mission becomes more and more a hardcore strategic experience. And by hardcore I mean the diffculty curve, although it seems pretty easy at the beginning, all of a sudden you come across points in a mission that can easily wipe all your squads, unless you are very careful and resourceful.
This is where the game graphics should be taken into consideration. I really love the attention to details (like snow crumbling under characters' feet, ambient sounds, a boy reaching for a wall to gather snow to make a snowball, etc.) but in all of that I always claim that the more graphically complex the RTS game is, the less intuitive and user-friendly it becomes. Everything from unit control, base management to battlefied awareness may become a mess and complete chaos because there is too much stuff going on on the screen. But the gorgeous and atmospheric sceneries really make up for it. The developers are Polish, so buckle up for some Slavic experience.
You will find many references to Polish culture and history. All the mech names are in Polish, despite the English version of the game. All the character names, proper names are in Polish. That is a pretty bold decision, but I'm glad they made it. As for references: the name of the main protagonist's brother is Janek Kos. Janek Kos was also the name of a fictional character from an old Polish book by Janusz Przymakowski and an old TV series based on that book, both titled "Four tank-men and a dog". That cannot be a coincidence. Another reference is the protagonist's bear, Wojtek. There was actually a bear named Wojtek "serving" in the Polish army during the Second World War.
Maybe due to a tight budget or to staff limitations, the voice actors of the English version are clearly Polish. You can hear the stiff pronunciation of some of them and as they pronounce Polish proper names perfectly, they do some strange mistakes in easy English words. Someone may call it "stylization" of the game, to keep you in the Slavic mood. Fine, the Rusviet soldiers speak in a very "Russian-like manner" but the dialogues between the Polanians just sound like a typical dialogue of Poles who speak in English /read English texts very well, yet with imperfect pronunciation (like "hurry" pronounced as "hairy" etc.). Still, that is the ONLY bad thing I have found in this game so far.
All the rest is complemented with a great soundtrack. From time to time you will hear pieces similar to Jeremy Soule's style, sometimes the music will remind you of the Witcher series. What is most important, however, the music fits perfectly the events that you are currently spectating on the screen. Whether it is a dialogue, a dramatic scene, a battle, simple exploration - the music is the final but well-selected piece in the puzzle.
All in all, I am really excited to see the final version of this game with all the features that are missing from the beta version!
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