Iron Harvest stomps into pre-order multiplayer alpha

Stompybot alt-history RTS Iron Harvest is available to play now, if you don't mind getting in on a slightly wobbly ground floor. A major Kickstarter success earlier this year for developers King Art, it looks a lot like Company Of Heroes but with ungainly dieselpunk robots instead of tanks and set in the '1920+' universe of artist Jakub Różalski. While a full story campaign is planned, King Art are shooting to make this one a competitive strategy game from the start, so have opened up their multiplayer alpha builds to players who buy in early. Take a peek at some combat below.

While Iron Harvest's current build (alpha 2) is multiplayer-centric, there is some AI to play against. There's an AI skirmish mode, a basic survival mission for co-op, and three maps to play on - two small battlefields for 1v1 play, and one larger 2v2 map. The current build has ten types of mechs, eight infantry unit types and a bunch of upgradeable base structures. The format should be immediately familiar to anyone who's played Company Of Heroes, base-building and all, but the mechs fill most (if not all) of the slots more conventional vehicles would.

Watch on YouTube

It's still early days yet for Iron Harvest, but it certainly looks and sounds the part. Maybe not worth the risk jumping in early unless you're a real-time strategy die hard (an under-served niche lately), but this is one to watch out for. The game cleared all of its Kickstarter stretch goals, including ones for co-op campaign support and challenge missions, plus some extra DLC later down the line. Initial plans were for the game to be single-player only, but it seems that Company Of Heroes fans hungry for something fresh-but-familiar quickly helped the game hit that goal, too.

To get into the alpha, you'll either have to have backed the game on Kickstarter, or pre-order the deluxe edition game direct from King-Art for £42.06/$55. Non-deluxe folks have to wait until beta testing begins.