Review: The Harvest

The Harvest

Review Of The Harvest By South African Indie Developers Luma Arcade

Are you busy and looking for a game to play that doesn’t require all your attention? Is solitaire not intensive enough to fill that free time? Do you not have a mouse readily available to play most games and are left with only one free hand and a trackpad? Well that sucks, but maybe you’ll want to look into The Harvest.

The Harvest is a top-down action RPG set in the future from South African Developers, Luma Arcade. In The Harvest, Earth has sustained an attack from an alien race named The Harvesters, who capture and turn humans and animals alike into cyborgs. The humans have created a Global Defense Force that uses mechanized infantry units that are controlled by humans. The suits stand to protect the human from being turned into Cyborgs by The Harvesters. The mission you are on leads you to find out that The Harvesters have gotten their hands on a weapon called AIM, and unless you are able to stop them from using it, the human race is doomed.

Overall, The Harvest is an incredibly simple game. The game uses the mouse almost exclusively and primarily uses the left mouse button. Players will left click to move, left click an enemy or destructible item to attack, double click on an enemy, themselves, or a point on the screen to activate an ability, and hold shift and click to activate a defensive ability.

The Pause menu is cut into five sections: The status screen, The Equipment screen, The Shop, The Mission Briefing menu, and the Options menu. The Equipment screen is where you can see all equipment you own and where you can sell them. While the Shop will show you a selection of items that you can buy from currency you pick up around the world or from selling your equipment. Chances are by the time you have enough money to purchase that piece of armor you wanted you’ll have already equipped something better.

The Harvest features five different mechs that you can use. Each mech has a unique set of three abilities. The game does include your standard leveling system that comes with an RPG and features four stat categories: Damage, Endurance, Agility, and Armor. Each level will give you five points to add to Damage, Endurance, or Agility at your own discretion leaving armor to only be upgraded by the equipment you find or purchase. The Damage Stat increases your damage output (duh), while Endurance determines the amount of health you have. The Agility stat works more like dexterity in any other RPG, where it determines the chance that you will land a successful hit and how much extra damage your critical hits do. After each level up you can spend your points at the status screen in the pause menu. The mission briefing screen in the pause menu will give you a view of the map of the level as you have explored thus far, an area for all dialogue, in the event that you missed something or want to refresh your own memory, and a section for all notes picked up during gameplay to help further the depth of the games story line.

The Harvest is currently available on Steam and the Windows 8 Marketplace for $6.99 USD. Luma Arcade is working on the port for Android and iOS, so that you can take The Harvest on the go. Keep an eye on their website or their twitter for news on when the port will be released.

The Harvest was developed by Luma Studios and published by Microsoft Studios. It is available on Steam for $6.99 USD. A copy of the game was received from Luma Studios for review purposes.