Harvest: massive encounter is the newly released game from oxeye games the makers of Dawn of Daria. harvest is an addictive strategy game that is hard to put down.

The games strength is its level of polish, every aspect has been improved in part due to its extensive beta process. This puts it in a good position to impress people who may not be so interested in strategy games. I certainly was impressed by its gameplay and spent many hours trying to improve my base. Since this is what the game is about, building the best base and staying alive for as long as possible. You begin on an empty planet with a couple of solar buildings and resources scattered around your base. You then move onto building miners and connecting points. This is when the aliens start to attack, slowly at first but as the game progresses their numbers rise. Your defenses come in the form of laser towers and missile turrets.

How you build your base is up to you, but in harvest there are a couple of better strategies which you discover as you play. This is the fun bit of the game, trying to find the ‘best fit’ base. Other gameplay types exist, they are wave mode, rush, insane and also creative where you can do what you like. theoretically there is unlimited gameplay here as you can never have the ‘best’ base. But the game does get repetitive thanks to the limited number of buildings and defenses.

The visuals and sound are both simple and repetitive but are very enjoyable. They inspire creativity and also enable the game to be run on lower spec computers.

Overall i found the game to be a great break from the hardcore games and highly addictive. However it didn’t last long before i returned to my hardcore games.

I would give the game a 7 out of 10.