Køb Harvest: Massive Encounter

☺ 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!

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.

Tower defence with a touch of 4X resource gathering.

The seemingly unlimited units allow a truly epic scale.

Also the ability to link weaker laser towers together gives a creative freedom not often found in the genre.

As ever, balance is the key but like most great RTS/Tower Defence games there are myriad ways of achieving balance and victory.

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.

Massive is right! RTS writ large. No story, just get in there, mine resources, build stuff, manage your power, and shoot the bad guys before they destroy your base.

Easy to learn, difficult to beat. Excellent to be available on Linux too, but for some reasons in sandbox-mode there are missing those buildings and mainly in sandbox mode is no possible to add enemies in Linux-version. But game itself is still very pleasant acquaintance.

YES YES YES YES YES. Excellent defense game. Feels good, like retro good. Old school video games good.

This game is tuff but a good thing to get otherwise.

A great tower- eeh... survival game with a bitter after-taste:

The invaders eventually and inevitably run over your base in the end...
No victory for humanity in this game.
=(

I hate this game so much . . . . .


So why do i keep coming back for more?

Pretty interesting Tower Defense type of game. The basic idea is the same as most tower defense except there is no "path" for the bad guys, they just attack from every side.

Collect rocks (money) and build guns to fight aliens. The twist is that they take an idea from C&C where you need power nodes to be collected to everything. A few gun upgrades, but not much.

Not bad game since I got it bundled with others and some of the later waves had so much guns shooting and aliens blowing up... my monster machine chopped just a bit! ~ whcih is rare.

Anyways ~ good for what it is, but gets boring a bit soon for my taste.

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.

[Rating: 57/100]

Tower defense. It IS massive, also, there's an encounter.

For a simple mechanic, this game does a fantastic job of making is interesting. For those high-score junkies who like a dash of RTS mechanics, this game is made for you. I've played the first level countless times in an attempt to improve, try new strategies, and simply enjoy the thoroughness of the mechanic.

Honestly, it's a tower defense that feels a little closer to it's RTS roots than a true RTS, still, decently fun, even if the levels ramp up in difficulty REALLY fast.

The game is an interesting Tower Defense idea with wide open map, random enemy spaws and interesting mechanics such as linking laser towers together to increase range and damage and missle silos which can be upgraded twice to either do 4 area of effect chain lightning attacks or 4 long range missle strikes.... Which brings me to the good and bad aspects of this game.

Good
-Unique concept on the normal tower Defense game.
-Very good stratagy use
-No need to waste time on multiple unlockables

Bad
-Laser towers don't link/work 60% of the time even when fully powered, enemy in site and still powered
-Missle silos sometimes lose their 'Area Ring' on upgrade making the radius of which enemies are targeted at is point blank
- Very resource and stratagy heavy to the point one mistep punishes you heavily for it
-Resource gathering is slower then resource need or use
-Minimal bare units (no unlockable towers) make for heavy micromanagement
-No specialized towers with enemeies that are unique (the one that spaws reinforcements will always sit outside of laser tower range and spawn kamakazies) make for difficult planning
-Poor pacing as you barely get your feet wet before you're thrown head first in with the sharks.

That said I do like the game, but it seems to have been released prior to all the bugs being fixed and as I've had this game for only a short time, it seems if they haven't been fixed by now, they never will be. If you can get past the gliches and the tedious game play repitition, this is a great and challenging game. If not then don't even waste your breath.

So its a game about installing packages to your operating system over and over again, how exciting.

Very hard, fun, old-school, simple-yet-deep tower defense game. If you like a challenge, this might just be the game for you.

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

Beau mais moyen

I have mixed feeling on this game. It was cheap when I bought it, but it did not keep my attention for long. It's like a loose based tower/base defense, has three worlds with different conditions and four alternate modes.