What’s Gus Playing?: Iron Harvest 1920+

January 13, 2019 Featured Posts, What's Gus Playing, Whatever

What’s Gus Playing?: Iron Harvest 1920+

The gaming universe of Scythe, set in an alternate Eastern European 1920-era, is right up my street. Replete with steampunk, First World War tech and mechs, it is all I could ever ask for in a game.

When KING Art Games announced the Kickstarter campaign for the directly-related Iron Harvest PC Real Time Strategy game, I immediately contributed as much cash as I could afford. I also recently bought Scythe: Digital Edition PC game on Steam, which has admittedly, so far, been a lot for me to wrap my brain around.

By: Lloyd Sabin,

I dove into the tutorials, but then attempted to start an actual game about a week later, but nothing stuck. I’ll have to try again. I’ve even toyed with the idea of buying the board game version of Scythe – the only problem is that I have no actual humans within 100 miles to play it with. That’s probably both a blessing and a curse.

Anyway – Iron Harvest is now in its 2nd alpha version. The alpha build currently includes two factions (Polania and Saxony) and several maps to try out. Not a lot of content yet, but I had a ton of fun playing both factions.

There are standard rifle-carrying infantry as well as engineers, and each unit type can upgrade their abilities with grenades, pistols, shovels, and sub-machine guns found on the battlefield. They are very fun to play with and the AI can be quite cutthroat. I turned down the difficulty to ‘Easy’ after getting slaughtered by Saxon infantry armed with sub-machine guns.

Both factions have HQ buildings, oil wells, iron mines and strategic points available for capture on the maps now available – these maps include an abandoned train yard, a river valley and an industrial area complete with ambush-ready alleyways. Buildings can be constructed by engineers.

My favorite building, however, is the workshop, in which there are 3 to 4 different types of mechs now available to each faction. The giant walkers range from oversized, steam-powered suits of iron armor, two-legged runners armed with heavy machine guns, and finally, to four-legged mechanical spiders. Each faction has different mechs – my favorite right now is the two-legged machine armed with what I can best describe as an elephant gun and bayonet – the rifle has great stopping power and then the mech can wallop the crap out of its unfortunate target. It is also well armored and difficult to take down for opposing infantry and even other mechs.

Even with the limited amount of content available right now I still had a great time with this early Iron Harvest build. It ran smoothly, definitely provided a challenge (I hope to ratchet the difficulty back up to ‘Normal’) and has both great graphics and music.

Things can only get better as more components are added to the game, including, of course, the campaign(s). Look for further updates here at Grogheads as Iron Harvest further evolves and check out the images below to hold you over. If you enjoy playing historical-flavored RTS games, then Iron Harvest should be on your watch list.