The contrast between militarized utilitarian farm equipment and art deco futurism works surprisingly well. Usonia's mechs and airships are brilliant: Their basic mech, the M-29 Salem, looks like an Airstream tractor body welded to two chunky T-rex legs, while the ZR-3 Revere airship is a beautiful streamlined locomotive with ducted rotors, a big rear propeller, and in-line pods of rockets. Once I got past that, however, I did get to appreciate the smart design that went into the new faction, and even some nuance to the new air units. It's the most disappointing thing about Operation Eagle – instead of some fascinating new thing, behaving in a unique way, air units feel like dull hovercraft, stopping instantly, accelerating rapidly, and turning on a pin.
Airships just don't feel like a great fit when you compare them to Iron Harvest's signature mechs. It makes airships feel like their basic design was copy-pasted from some other, more traditional RTS that didn’t account for cover, like StarCraft 2, rather than Iron Harvest’s more direct inspiration, Company of Heroes. On battlefields that have, up until this point, been so very about terrain, cover, and line of sight, it’s audacious how they cruise on past all that interesting stuff, very literally ignoring it by shooting over terrain that others can't fire back through, like walls. The way they move and attack feels out of place. They slide smoothly around the sky, really.
Sometimes they kind of turn in place a bit. Where the mechs stomp, smash, and bash their way across the battlefield leaving a trail of wreckage in their wake, each with its own style of maneuvering, the airships just… float. That’s reflected by Ursonia’s two unique air units – paratroopers, and an airborne hero – while all sides share Skybikes, Airlifts, and Gunships.ĭisappointingly, the airships just don't feel like a great fit when you compare them to Iron Harvest's signature mechs. Its forces are focused on air power more than mech power, which showcases this expansion’s big new feature for all sides: airship combat. It doesn’t do the best job of introducing air combat, which ends up disrupting the carefully constructed cover-based warfare in ways that make it less interesting instead of more, but Operation Eagle’s campaign in particular is still a worthy addition to Iron Harvest.Īs a fan of the Iron Harvest universe of 1920+, I was thrilled to explore the new faction, Usonia, which is the equivalent of the United States of America. Though it doesn't add new challenges or game types, it does include a high-quality story-driven campaign with the same level of impressive cutscenes and voice acting you'd expect after playing the base campaign. That focus is back for the Operation Eagle expansion, which adds a new America-inspired faction and air combat. Iron Harvest's single-player campaign was a surprise hit for me, one that I didn't expect to be as good as it was.
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