Rating of
2/5
Rusted Out and Ready to Recycle
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/29/25
“Iron Harvest, which released in the Plague Year 2020, is the most recent endeavor from King Art Games and Eurojank publisher, Deep Silver. King Art’s initial efforts were the ‘Book of Unwritten Tales’ series of Adventure games, with a couple of other more obscure titles from other genres thrown in there for fun. While I, personally, can’t stand the Real-Time Strategy (RTS) genre – specifically because of the ‘Real-Time’ part – I do enjoy alternate history and mechs, both of which feature prominently in “Iron Harvest.” What finally pushed me over the edge and convinced me to take a chance with this particular game was the fact that it does, indeed, have a story campaign, and this story campaign has, indeed, been patched into a cooperative experience for 2 players.
With my friend Matt constantly ranting about how great the RTS genre is and lamenting the fact that so few publishers produce RTSes with story campaigns like Blizzard did in the ‘90s, “Iron Harvest” seemed to be the answer to his prayers. The fact that it’s a cooperative game he could use to convince me of the Truth of his opinion on the genre was just icing on the cake. Thus, we both decided to use “Iron Harvest” as one of our Backlog Ablution titles for the year, but with the year half over, and the sequence of story campaigns only half done, we decided to call it and toss the rest in the trash, as neither of us was having any fun or looking forward to our next session.
Presentation
“Iron Harvest” has quite a few red flags with regard to its presentation. First, it’s built in the Unity Engine, so it can be expected to have hitches, glitches, and technical issues. On top of that, unless the studio using Unity has some insanely talented digital artists working on the visuals, the resulting game will always look fairly bland and uninspired… and that’s exactly how “Iron Harvest” looks. Admirably, the game uses the same graphical assets for both gameplay and cutscenes – for the most part – which results in cutscene graphics looking a little bit watered down and basic, even on the highest settings, while gameplay graphics rarely get a chance to shine due to the nature of the RTS genre and how far away the camera is from anything that might look nice. And when I say that the game is 50% game and 50% cutscenes, I’m not exaggerating. Each of the discreet faction campaigns begins with a cutscene, then alternates a mission with a cutscene until the end.
Audio is wholly mediocre. While the game is fully voiced both for units’ audio quite when commanding them and for narrative voiceover and cutscenes, the performances are merely “acceptable.” There are a lot of European accents going on, and some of them don’t quite hit the mark to my Midwestern American (read: no accent whatsoever) ear. The soundtrack is… there. It’s neither memorable nor grating. In general, the audio presentation is so bland and lifeless, it utterly pales when compared to Blizzard’s ‘90s RTSes, as I used audio clips from “Warcraft 2” as my Windows system sounds for decades… and I’d never even played “Warcraft 2!”
Technically, “Iron Harvest” is a bit of a mess. It does, at least, support Xinput controllers out of the box, and features a generally-usable layout for a genre that is typically driven by insane mouse precision and clicks-per-second. The online features, on the other hand, are insanely buggy, making it very difficult to keep a cooperative party together while playing the campaign. Even worse, being in a party disables the ability to save mid-mission, which is pretty important, since we found that most missions were 40 minutes to an hour-and-a-half long, with multiple phases that could have been broken down into shorter missions, or at least with auto-checkpoints. Even more fun than that, though, is the fact that the guest player in a party can’t see cutscenes and can’t choose to watch unlocked cutscenes from the menu without leaving the party first. The cherry on top of this poor networked coop experience, however, is the fact that many times the game would simply glitch out at the end of a mission, ejecting Matt from the party and appearing to freeze up, sometimes with a black screen, sometimes with some UI buttons mysteriously absent (like the “continue” and “exit” buttons). The whole thing just felt incredibly unpolished, like the cooperative campaign was just patched-in as an afterthought to placate customers and possibly lure in a few more… which is exactly what it was.
Story
“Iron Harvest” tells an alternative history version of World War I, in which Nikola Tesla’s inventions had a much greater effect on technological advancement than they did in reality, resulting in the militaries of the Western world fielding a variety of walking war machines powered by a combination of petroleum and Direct Current. This world is not, in fact, an original invention by King Art, but is rather an adaptation of the game world created by Polish painter, Jakub Rozalski, and American board game designers, Jamey Stegmaier and Alan Stone, for a tabletop game called “Scythe.” The title, “Iron Harvest,” is pulled from the real phenomenon of European farmers constantly digging up shrapnel and expended munitions from the two World Wars, even to this day.
Our story begins in Polania – alternate history Poland – and introduces us to Anna and Janek Kos, the daughter and son of their village’s leader. We are shown the bond between the two siblings as they hunt for deer together in their youth, and Janek teaches Anna how to shoot properly. Flash forward a few years and Janek has been conscripted into the Polanian army – and presumed killed in action – while Anna defends her home town as a consummate sniper with the Polanian Resistance. However, one day a large force of Rusviets – alternate history Russians – appear near the village, and are clearly on the hunt for something… or someone. That someone turns out to be Anna’s father, who is a big-brain engineer and former colleague of Tesla himself, whom the Rusviets are convinced can get them past the automated defenses surrounding Tesla’s lab and into the trove of blueprints for super-weapons it contains.
After following Anna’s exploits with the Polanian Resistance for a while, during which she witnesses a variety of war crimes and betrayals, our perspective shifts to her brother, Janek, who was not, in fact, killed in action, but badly injured and so mutilated that the Rusviet forces mistook him for one of their own and turned him into a Tesla-coil-powered cyborg. In spite of his injuries, Janek remains mentally himself, and decides to use his mistaken identity and mech-like body to bide his time, learn what’s really going on behind the scenes in Rusviet, then kill his commanding officer in glorious revenge. However, Janek soon learns, with the help of a Rusviet femme fatale spy, that the majority of Rusviet forces aren’t being commanded by the Tsar, but by a mysterious cloak-and-dagger organization known as Fenris.
With Anna and Janek reunited in bittersweet fashion, the action switches focus to the Saxony - alternate history German – forces of Prince Wilhelm, the actual main antagonist toward the Rusviets, as he seeks glory on the battlefield, and naturally fails to do so.
It was the beginning of the Saxony Campaign that ultimately put the final nail in the coffin of my desire to finish this game. While the setting and narrative are both quite interesting – which is no-doubt due to the work by the “Scythe” tabletop team rather than anyone at King Art – the gameplay was always a bit of a drag, and the Saxony faction’s units were a bit too much to cope with.
I would still love to see a different adaptation of the “Scythe” campaign setting, with a different team managing gameplay, but even as intriguing as the world’s lore is, I’d rather just read a summary of the plot online and watch the cutscenes on YouTube than actually play through the second half of the game. The fact that Matt and I both got burned out on the gameplay after only 15 hours is quite telling. Just thinking about slogging through another 15-20 hours of “Iron Harvest” gives me a headache.
Gameplay
“Iron Harvest” is a bog-standard RTS game in most ways that matter. However, the campaign feels like it’s all over the place, with numerous missions that don’t really involve building bases or collecting resources, but rather making do with a fixed number of units against unknown forces. Worst of all are the bizarre story-centric missions where the player will mostly control one or two Hero units on foot rather than squadrons of infantry or single mechs.
When “Iron Harvest” is being a “normal” RTS and not trying to do something weird for story purposes, it’s a fairly basic experience. Each of the game’s four factions has access to specific types of foot soldiers, as well as faction specific mechs. Base building is pretty stripped-down, as there are only a handful of buildings – a command center, a barracks, and a garage – with the former being the thing you don’t want enemies to destroy and the latter 2 being where new units come from. Each unit costs a specific amount of iron and/or oil to create. The game’s two resources come in a trickle just from having a command center, but supply can be increased prodigiously by capturing oil wells and iron mines. Wells and mines are bottomless, and will never be depleted. However, enemy units will try to take them if they aren’t well defended.
Defenses come in the form of basic walls, barbed wire fences, and bunkers. The most basic bunker requires a unit of foot soldiers to be assigned to it in order to fire at enemies, while the two advanced bunkers have automated guns that can be supplemented with an infantry unit. Infantry comes in a wide variety of flavors, with engineers being of particular importance, since they can repair mechs in the field and build defenses wherever they may be. Other infantry types include flamethrowers (who are really strong against opposing buildings), machine gunners (strong against other infantry), grenadiers (strong against mechs for a few seconds before they all die), medics (who can heal other infantry units), and basic riflemen (who suck, but are cheap).
Infantry units are not created individually as they were in “classic” RTSes, but rather come out of the barracks in small groups, only able to move and act as a unit. As a unit kills enemies, individuals within that unit can level up, and as the unit takes damage, individuals will die and shrink the unit’s size. However, just because infantry come out of the barracks in groups does not mean that it’s somehow “easy” to build up a huge force and overwhelm enemy positions. This is because there is a hard cap on the number of units the player’s team can have active in any given mission, with both infantry and mechs counting against the total.
So, if the gameplay is just bog-standard RTS, why did Matt and I struggle to enjoy it so much? Well, Matt’s one-track-mind for strategy only ever did Zerg Rushes in Blizzard’s games, so the fact that we couldn’t create enough units quickly enough frustrated him. The fact that the various factions have wildly disparate Hero units and mechs available made going from the Rusviet campaign, with One-Shot Janek in every mission, to the Saxony campaign where two gigantic mechs were incapable of carpet bombing a handful of infantry out of existence, just too jarring.
Then there were the little niggling details, such as the pathfinding AI for units being unbelievably stupid, stationary units failing to shoot at enemies that were walking right past them, and the omnipresent bugbear of the RTS genre that is the computer player not being forced to follow the same rules as the player. We played through most of the Polanian Campaign on “Normal” difficulty, but had to switch to “Easy” the end, then played the entire Rusviet Campaign on “Easy.” When the Saxony Campaign gave us what felt like too much resistance on “Easy” and there was no “Very Easy” or “I Just Want the Story, Dammit” modes, we called it quits. While it could be considered “good” that the campaign missions didn’t just fall into a rut of being the same thing over and over, this campaign diversity turned out to be a double-edged sword, in that it never really gave us the opportunity to learn all of the game’s mechanics and how to play “well” instead of just bumbling through everything and relying on overpowered Heroes.
Overall
“Iron Harvest” did more to interest me in learning more about the “Scythe” tabletop game than it did to soften my position of UTTER HATRED toward the RTS genre. This game did everything I wanted an RTS to do – great setting, mechs, cutscenes, a campaign, and coop – but did all of it so half-assedly that the result just isn’t fun or engaging in any way, shape or form.
Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 3.5/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 2/5
