In Iron Harvest, soldiers with rusty rifles fight alongside giant mechs that can rain down rockets from the sky. It's an RTS set in an an alternate post-World War 1 universe in which society is obsessed with robotic walking machines and farmers are getting rich from the 'Iron Harvest', the name given to the bounty of weapons, shrapnel and ammo found in their fields after the war.
The game was announced a while back but developer King Art Games has just released a video explaining some of the game's systems, which seems like a good excuse to talk about it. One of the core features is a fully destructible environment, and the tech looks impressive. Rather than just disintegrating any old way, buildings crumble realistically depending on the direction they're hit from. It reminds me a bit of Red Faction: Guerrilla, which has similarly excellent destruction effects.
That system means you can destroy and create cover. If you blow up a low wall the enemy will lose a valuable cover spot (and any soldiers behind it will ragdoll satisfyingly), but chunks of a destroyed environment could be used as cover, too. In the video, a destroyed mech crashes to the ground, and soldiers rush in to huddle behind its smoking shell.
The mechs will be the stars, and they'll do most of the heavy lifting, but you'll also be controlling squads of soldiers. King Art Games is working on a single-player campaign—for which there's no release date yet—and a 1v1 multiplayer mode that will be out in Spring 2018. That should be a good indication of whether the campaign is worth getting excited about.
Thanks, PCGamesN.
