Rating of
2/5
European Steampuke
Matt - wrote on 12/28/25
During high school, I was introduced to RTS games through Blizzard’s “Warcraft II”. Immediately, I was hooked. “Command and Conquer,” “Starcraft,” “Age of Empires,” and “Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds” all became enjoyable franchises that I played for many hours into my college years. During those years, PC gaming was synonymous with RTS for me. A return to playing games on consoles like the Gamecube and Wii diverted my attention from the genre, and when I was introduced to Steam, I spent little time playing RTSes. I did try to have our co-op group play an open-source RTS, Zero-K, but that was a disaster.
The RTS that I have historically played all have single-player campaign modes. Multiplayer is possible, but it is only on single-map skirmishes in a PVP or PVE setting. So when Nelson and I decided to play Iron Harvest this year for our Backlog Embiggenings challenge, I was hopeful that we would finally enjoy a multiplayer RTS with a campaign, not to mention a game that involved mechs, which both of us enjoy. However, I (we) were solely disappointed by the burning pile of trash that Iron Harvest was.
Story (2.5 out of 5)
Iron Harvest is a steampunk game set in an alternate Eastern and Central Europe, loosely based on Poland, Russia, and Prussia/Germany. The multiplayer campaigns are centered around these regions. The first campaign is set in Polania, the second is about the Rusviets, and the third involves Saxony. The story itself isn’t remarkable or unremarkable. It is just average. Nothing stands out about it. It plays on typical tropes of underdog revolutionaries and conflicting families in a steampunk technological age. The first two campaigns were okay; however, the third was abysmal, causing a quick loss of interest.
Presentation (2.5 out of 5)
The game is a standard RTS with a variety of troops, including mechs. At first, the steampunk setting seemed promising; however, it didn’t match the quality of games like Valkyria Chronicles with a similar setting involving steampunk elements. The game looked like a step above the open-source Zero-K. It doesn’t match the style or polish of Blizzard’s games, and it looks more similar to a bland Age of Empires game from 2002. I’m not able to comment on the cut scenes that added story elements and context since every time we would finish a mission, my mission selection screen would freeze, and I would be kicked out of the party, unable to watch the cinematics with my teammate. It was so frustrating that I didn’t find the desire to go back and watch many of them on my own.
Gameplay (1 out of 5)
Iron Harvest suffers from a buggy multiplayer game system. Not only were there problems going from one mission to the next, in-game missions didn’t progress correctly and story elements became stuck, forcing us to restart the mission at times. The game involved playable “hero” characters along with various generic soldiers and mechs. Some characters were memorable, specifically the cyborg hero of the Rusviet campaign; however, the generic soldiers and mechs were uninspiring. In our play, we tended to use only two types of mech, and found that others weren’t balanced too well (for example, slow and lacking firepower). The skill trees to develop mechs and soldiers also didn’t progress in a linear fashion like one would expect, adding types and features as the missions were completed, building upon itself.
Overall (2 out of 5)
Iron Harvest is a game that generally gets worse over time. By the time we made it to the third campaign, our patience was thin, and quickly the game became too much that we decided to give it the boot. The bugs, the poor implementation of a multiplayer campaign, the seemingly random failures of missions for arbitrary reasons made the game an onerous chore to play, not something for fun.
