Harvested

Harvested is an indie title that has set very high expectations for itself, which is a good thing. At heart, it’s a top-down survival shooter that blends sandbox building, resource gathering, real-time strategy and a little bit of role-playing. It’s a lot of stuff to cram into a lightweight game, but it seems to work. Well, in most part.

Harvested shares the design of other indie titles that roughly gravitate around the same concept but this one takes it up a notch, or two. Apart from shooting demons like a madman when night falls, you also have to keep track of resources, colonists, defenses, enemy movement, and their numbers.

This would be a fairly tough game if you only had the survival and resource gathering bits, but the tower defense and real-time strategy features make it a challenge even for the most experienced gamer. However, this can also backfire. When enemies begin to pile up, and your defenses start to fall, it’s easy to lose your cool and think about imbalanced gameplay.

Harvested is a game that tolerates very little error on your behalf. Make one small mistake and things can spiral out of control very fast. There are a few kinks to work out in the game, and there is certainly room for improvement. For example, at this time, there are no quick build keys for the structures or a pause feature (or even a consumable of sorts) to use when you really need time to think things through.

One more thing that can get to you is that if an enemy gets too close while you're shooting, your character automatically switches to the knife for close combat. But, if I were fighting demons from another dimension, having an infinite amount of bullets, I’d never switch to a knife. After all, a bullet to the brain is always more effective than a stab, or ten.

To wrap it up, Harvested has a few loose ends to tie up but they're surely on the to-do list. The game has a good core and the gameplay, although in need of some polishing, handles really well.