Iron Harvest - Gamescom 2019 Preview - Welcome to Stoffel Presents

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by Badger Nimahson

Iron Harvest is a classic RTS set in the amazing Diesel-Punk universe based on the work of Polish artist Jakub Rozalski. I was able to spend about 30 minutes actually playing Iron Harvest at Gamescom 2019 and was impressed by what I saw.

The premise to Iron Harvest is described in the press release as:
At the dawn of the 20th century, shortly after the end of the Great War, the world is full of secrets and mysteries, of opportunities and challenges. Tradition clashes with scientific and technological progress, while Europe is still recovering from the brutal battles of the World War. Iron Harvest is a real-time strategy game (RTS) set in the alternate reality of 1920+, just after the end of the Great War.

Iron Harvest is indeed a beautiful looking game and the dieselpunk mechs look terrifying in a botched together could either kill me or blow up at any time kind of way.

Gameplay was your standard RTS fair and that isn’t a complaint. It uses a tried and tested method that works extremely well. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. It is as simple as that.

I did find the combat somewhat sloppy in the level I played but assume this will be polished and rectified by the time of release next year. I don’t think this is a major problem as I need to stress I was playing an Alpha build of Iron Harvest.

KING Art Games, the team behind Iron Harvest, were intent on creating the “perfect RTS game” that they decided to fully fund Iron Harvest via Kickstarter and include the community in all aspects of development.

This approach obviously worked because when the Kickstarter campaign ended it had surpassed its aim of $450,000 dollars and made a whopping $1.3 million!

That is one hell of a community behind the game giving feedback and KING Art Games obviously feel a lot of love and respect for the community they have fostered and grown.

As is evident by their Gamescom 2019 announcement where they not only announced the release date for Iron Harvest as the very cute 1.9.20 but also announced that, in a break from the trend for indie developers, it would NOT be launching exclusively on Epic Game Store and would indeed be on all platforms for all fans on day one.

Iron Harvest was a joy to play. It is simple to pick up but hints at depth and a great narrative story. Alas, I only got to play one level so can’t speak with too much authority. I don’t even know why Anna has a pet grizzly bear!