Recent reviews by Henry of Skalitz

Truly a masterpiece of a game. Not even the first game has kept me sucked in for so long. It's the 2nd day in a row that I've sat and played long until 6am, completely losing the track of time. 22 hours in, and I have BARELY scratched the surface of this game. I'm still wandering around the starting area, doing quests and whatnot!

The last time I got so sucked into a game, was when I wanted to finish Portal 2 all in one go.

Edit: After 194 hours I have finished my first playthrough. a m a z i n g

If I have to be honest, this game is pretty mid.
It feels like the devs had the brilliant idea of "LET'S DO THE SAME BUT BETTER LOOKING" when Lethal Company released.

When you look at it, Content Warning fills areas where Lethal Company isn't "advanced" at like animations, graphics, physics, overall visuals (even though the simplicity of those is what makes Lethal Company good IMO), but it lacks everything else that Lethal Company has. No lore, no spooky ambience, nothing really. The monsters aren't memorable at all either and there is nothing to do for the rest of the players besides walking behind the camera guy and picking the camera up if he dies. There's no reason to go exploring, because you won't be able to do anything anyways if you don't have the camera.

Making videos is inconsistent as hell. A video with monsters being recorded had less views than a video where for the first 2/3 of the tape we goofed around before even going down with the diving bell...

There are only 2 things I liked about this game. The first being the ability to jump pretty much anywhere you want. Your movement is physics based and restricted to your ragdoll instead of being restricted to a static hitbox. You can squeeze through windows and jump on small ledges.
The second thing is the slime enemy. I found it really unique and quite creepy if you think about it. He doesn't seem to kill you, he drags you away from your friends into unknown sections of the map. When he dragged our first friend away all 3 of us chased after him but unfortunately didn't find our friend. Then he took our 2nd friend away and the remaining 2 of us ran out of recording tape. At the end of our first match only me and my friend returned to the diving bell thinking only we were left alive, only to see that the first of our friends who got taken by the slime was still alive and moving, since his distance to the bell was changing on the screen. The 2nd one was unfortunately dead.

Better get this before 17th of November. It will no longer be available at all!

Changing this review to negative because I do not like the direction the devs are taking (AKA being greedy and introducing P2W skins with stats different than the original item which heavily affect gameplay)

Edit: Review still stands as facepunch wants to release a "decor" DLC but with P2W barrels that take up less space and give the same storage as a large box

What even is the purpose of this game? Boring as hell. There is literally nothing to do.

Edit: Just found out it was made by a youtuber and all the positive reviews are basically his viewers. Game should be removed from the steam store like all other trash games were removed.

Deleted from library. I don't ever want to come back to this mental illness of a game

So, Iron Harvest...

I had my eye on this game for quite a long time, before it got even released. The steampunk environment sounded very interesting, and the fact that it had some Company of Heroes mechanics appealed to me the most.

When I got the game... ugh.

First things first, optimization. The game runs AWFULLY slow, slower than rust, slower than anything I have played. Produce 4 units more and your FPS are cut in half while the game is not even using 50% of your CPU. I managed to hit 60 fps only on the first map on the first campaign which had little to no units. The settings do not matter at all, you might get a 4 fps increase between lowest settings and highest settings. It's insanely unstable too, my game crashed and I had to start a mission over from the beginning because my save wouldn't want to load.

There are numerous bugs, it's been 9 months since release and obvious bugs are not fixed. Heroes getting stuck when using abilities, units not listening to commands at all, etc.

The factions are bland. The ground units are basically the same except the first basic units, the mechs are somewhat different but the later, most expensive mechs feel underwhelming. They die too quickly and have too weak of attacks. That's especially the case in Polania's mechs, as they all have artillery for some reason which is pretty much useless against infantry that moves forward, just like in Company of Heroes. They also have the range of a peashooter while having a cannon with a diameter larger than a tractor's wheel, and the explosiong from that huge shell has a range of a firecracker.

On campaign mode even on Medium difficulty if all you use is infantry it feels like piece of cake difficulty. Your infantry is more accurate than enemy infantry and has more health. The only things that are a danger to them are getting out of cover, grenades, flamethrower mechs and MG bunkers. It's all about infantry spam, mechs are a waste of time and they die too quickly.

The cover system is similar to Company of Heroes, but ten times worse. Your units can only take cover behind predefined spots (short walls, sandbags, train carts etc). In CoH units could also take cover in blown up holes, behind trees, behind pretty much everything. This is not the case here.
Your units in Iron Harvest can also go inside buildings, but for some reason they seem to take even more damage inside them than if they are standing behind some kind of cover (except for player built bunkers, the bunker takes damage first and then your units) plus you can only fit a single unit inside and they almost never shoot at the enemy when inside the building (unless it's a player built bunker)

The story... the story is okay. Not much to say here. It's as good as it can be for an RTS game. I like the introduction of Wojtek the bear as he was a historical animal, but a girl (who is still a kid mind you) with a sniper rifle and an aim better than trained enemy soldiers feels... weird? I don't know, it's not something I'd consider to put in a story about brutal war.

Conclusion?
Iron harvest is a game that tries to strongly mimic Company of Heroes, but in a different setting, and unfortunately fails miserably at it.

It was a really... special game.

The overall atmosphere was constantly disturbing. The looks of the janitor, twin chefs and the guests...everything was disturbing. I felt like I don't wanna play this game anymore, I wanted to quit, and yet the curiosity got the better of me and I finished it.

Worth it.


I'm a little disappointed that it was so short, but I can't complain much since I got it for free anyways and I also didn't look for collectibles.

The free Roblox Studio is much better than this lol

Most boring RTS I have ever played. Extremely unoptimized. So much that my rig struggles less with trying to run Rust at medium settings than running this at low-medium. Even at low I get stuttering every few seconds.

90% of the time you just wait until you get to the industrial age.
The game trailer shows awesome walls and defences, guess what? You'll need none of them. Walls are a waste of precious resources, upgrading units is a TOTAL waste of resources as upgrades just vanish after you get into a new age. It's all about who gets to industrial age first and can spam mortars + machine guns eventually tanks as well to kill the enemy. If you are developing as fast as your enemy then prepare for a long match taking over 3 hours until one of you eventually runs out of resources trying to spam units.
Pathfinding of units is literally worse than starcraft and it will make you lose a battle with a player. Tanks will try to drive themselves into each other effectively becoming stuck and blocking the path for every other unit, tanks will randomly decide to go back the other way.
You cannot rotate your camera, which in my opinion is one of the most basic and mandatory things an RTS should have. At least you are able to zoom in and out.

I understand this is an early access game, but come on... it's on steam since October and basic features are still missing!

Eh, it's good for few minutes.