Well, now you've gone and done it. You've made a remarkably unique Tower Defense game, and that takes some serious effort these days, along with a whole lot of crazy.

Harvest: Massive Encounter is honestly just that: a TD game. If you like TD games, you're going to enjoy it.

So what makes it so unique compared to the others out there on the market, from the starcraft 2 maps to flash games?

First off, resource harvesting. You get nothing for killing enemy units; you're dumped into the middle of an endless field full of minerals. Your job is to mine as many minerals as possible, and survive as long as you can. (With some variations on a theme for different game modes).

The map starts out small, but if you build towards the edge of any one side, it'll stretch out, expanding the minimap further and letting you move farther away from your base. As such, you have pretty much unlimited room to build, but the most dense packs of minerals will be close to where you start off, and the farther from your central base you get, the less efficient mining will become.

The towers provided to you are remarkably few in number for a tower defense game, but they're very carefully fine tuned to be exactly what you need. For example, laser towers have relatively short range themselves, but can be set to focus all of the laser towers in an area to a single, massive beam. This effect can scale to an unlimited degree, and you can chain smaller groups of laser towers together to form an enormous, intricate network of lasers that has immense range and godlike firepower, or break off their power temporarily to wipe out a swarm of smaller enemies that are faster.

You can set your towers to prioritize, deprioritize, or ignore certain enemy types as well, so it's well within your power to tell little lasers to focus fire kill the suicide-bomber style gehenna shuttles, but ignore some of the larger units, while having your eagle class missle launchers ignore the shuttles unless they're the only thing left on the screen, or ignore them entirely, only aiming for bigger game to hunt.

Another really unique feature to H:ME is the energy system. I've seriously seen nothing remotely similar to it in any game before or since. The idea is that you build solar power generators, which create a ball of energy every few seconds. The energy ball bounces randomly between any adjacent point that it can possibly reach, until it comes across something that needs power, and then it rams the target and provides the power required, disappearing from your screen in so doing. This quickly leads to a vast, intricate network of energy lines going all over your base, and energy management becomes vitally important. Having a ton of energy on one side of your base, but not the spot that it's needed, is BAD. Fortunately, you have plenty of very easy to use tools to control your energy flow, such as marking a building as top priority to get any and all energy it needs, or drawing out routing paths to force energy balls to travel along a set path, only being allowed to follow their typical AI programming when they exit the path.

Pretty much everything in H:ME can be summed up this way: it's weird, but in a really good way. It's creative, unique, and it WORKS. It's not just different for the sake of being different, but rather, it's different because it makes the game more interesting and fun.

It'll take awhile to get used to most of the unique aspects that Harvest has to offer, but they're well worth the enjoyment once they've grown on you a bit.



Final Verdict:

Everything Harvest: Massive Encounter does, it does well. The learning curve is really quite steep, however, there's no plot, no multiplayer, and it's really just one big tower defense sandbox. For what it strives to be, it's pretty much perfect at. For what it doesn't try to be, however, it doesn't do at all. If you don't like TD games, this won't be the one to make you a convert, by any means, but it'll be one of the best TD games you've played if you do like them.


Score: About 70%. It does what it does pretty much perfectly, but it completely lacks a few areas that could make it a lot better still.

☺ A different twist on Tower Defence.
☺ Heavy on strategy.
☺ Solid mechanics.

☹ Limited diversity.
☹ Repetitive.

Harvest: Massive Encounter is appropriately named. It's up to you to defend yourself against large waves of enemies that attack from all sides rather than predefined routes as you harvest a finite amount of resources and build up your defences, enabling you to expand your territory to harvest yet more resources and defend against even larger and deadlier waves of enemies.

Unlike a lot of tower defence games, Harvest: Massive Encounter is all about the known variables and a synergy of mechanics. You require resources to build Harvesters, Solar Plants, Laser Towers, Missile Turrets and Link Nodes - no endless stream of unlockable buildings here, just the tools for the job! The Solar Plants produce the power you need to operate the harvesters and fire your turrets and everything needs to be connected via link nodes to allow for a smooth transfer of energy, should a link in the chain break or your layout bottlenecks your supply, you'll be looking at an even tougher fight to survive. It's a very clever mechanic that rewards thoughtful placement and allows you to steadily expand without being constrained to build only area's or a grid system.

It's all about keeping the synergy between your assets allowing you to expand, collect, defend and repeat. For added complexity, Laser Towers can be linked to produce a more powerful beam with a longer range, so it's not just about putting more towers down to stop the flow of enemies, it's also about creating strong defensive points to tackle the harder enemies (of which there are several types with varying strengths, such as speed or the ability to teleport in reinforcements).

It's a tough battle from the start until you're inevitably overwhelmed, victory is not so much about defeating your enemy but simply lasting as long as you can before your defences finally cave in. Maybe you'll fair better on the field, but it'll be tough as thousands of enemy ships close in.

This may all sound rather positive but unfortunately, because the game relies on such closely knit mechanics there isn't that much diversity in what you can do or the enemies you face, its simply about using those limited tools you're given to the best of your abilities. You're also limited to the one, barren map until you can unlock another two after putting quite a few hours into the game and while there are a few game modes available, they offer a similar experience.

While a solid strategy game and a unique tower defence title, I'd only really recommend the game for those patient few that like a challenge, enjoy refining their tactics and can feel a sense of accomplishment in beating their old records. While the game can be satisfying and very rewarding when you defeat a wave with all your turrets still intact, for those looking for a greater sense of progression or some light hearted fun, I feel the game could quickly become repetitive.

Thank you for your time!

RTS/Tower Defense game with simple mechanics but with the potential for a high level of strategy, with resource management and the way buildings interact with one another. Gameplay is mostly survival based, where you just try to to not lose for as long as possible against ever increasing numbers of enemies.

Also unique in the sense that as far as story goes, you are sort of the antagonist, stripping resources from alien planets for money, with the local alien populations understandably irritated about this and attacking you.

If this had multiplayer, I'd enter some jolly state of catharsis and never play anything else again (and never put it down).

A tower defense title that becomes too hard too fast. And because of that there's no fun to be had. There's no satisfaction in building towers that get destroyed within minutes of starting a game. The graphics are kinda cool though, it's all fairly detailed.