HighFleet review: a brilliant strategy game buried under frustrations

Oh what an atmosphere!

Nate is excited near HighFleet. Graham was excited about HighFleet before he became head vampire, or any. I was excited almost HighFleet. HighFleet is exciting. It is also very frustrating.

We're at the point where nosotros need a good shorthand for games built around a diagetic interface. HighFleet's puts you lot in the sky-shoes of an admiral poring over an electronic map display ringed by analogue radar-tuning dials, chunky buttons, a dangling phone receiver similar your gran'due south, and a big level to pull when information technology'southward time to country. Just there'southward a weird divide going on.

A degree of frustration is, if not innate, definitely a mutual design feature of the interface-'em-upward. HighFleet's equipment doesn't neglect or undermine you the way, say, Deadnaut'south does. When I play it I'g frequently fighting not the diagetic interface, only the one between it and me. When I'chiliad unsure of what strategy I should be pursuing information technology's not because of the challenges the game presents, but because I have too lilliputian context for most of those challenges to make a meaningful decision.

It's a game I respect more than than I like. The design is original and for the most part quite excellent. Yous lead a armada of aircraft through hostile territory in a bid to capture a piece of engineering science that you promise to use equally a bargaining chip in a war your side is about to lose. You pursue this however you see fit. Your ships must land at settlements to refuel, repair, shop, and refit, and to investigate leads. Some of those settlements offer cheap fuel, some better parts to reconfigure ships or fifty-fifty build from scratch in its detailed modular system. Some are enemy intel installations which, when captured, will briefly leak nearby send movements.

Those ship movements are vital because some are scary hunter fleets to exist feared, and others are valuable supply groups to be plundered. They'll transmit messages to each other besides, which y'all'll oftentimes intercept and then decode using a knobbly dial thingy, and then cross-reference with your map to mark their courses and plan your next moves. Bases that see you coming will alarm the hunter fleets, so you lot may want to send your fastest assault ships ahead of the master group to take them out.

My interceptors launch from a captured port, trailing vapour, to deadfall an incoming transport. Lush.

As Nate noted in his preview, information technology has a lot of moving parts, and they're pretty much all done well. But it's the joints between the design and the actor where things go wrong.

Some of it is down to the controls, which are maddeningly inconsistent. Allow me copy an example direct from my notes: "when I click on a module in my cargo in an attempt to adhere it to a ship, it instantly sells. If I click and drag, nil happens. How am I supposed to utilise the stuff in my cargo? To move my armada I right click, but when I create a splinter group and right click with that, it deselects them instead". I have more than notes like this than I'm willing to put a number on.

Hunters are coming, so I'll repair this ship'southward engines, refuel, and flee.

The ship refit screen in item is so fiddly and fussy that I plant myself looking for excuses not to use it. You tin, in theory, rebuild any of your ships into whatsoever you want, connecting structure and armour parts and bolting equipment onto them to your wallet's content. In exercise... well. All the parts you can buy are labelled not with names, merely indecipherable model numbers. Parts I bought or captured with 1 ship wouldn't be in my cargo when that same ship moved to the side by side port. Accidentally removing a part can't exist undone except past undoing every modify you've made, or putting it dorsum and waiting while it'due south reinstalled. Although HighFleet's various screens are very pretty, they're uncomfortable and irritating to operate.

These are more often than not minor things, liable to exist patched. In isolation they'd be a mumble-able aside, merely I found myself listing them considering they were compounding bigger issues.

Repetition and a lack of delegation is a big one. On the chief map screen, you lot must utilise petty rulers and pencils to brand notes, which starts out cute just soon becomes a job, especially when you realise your crew tin can apparently programme the map to prove enemy flight plans when y'all capture an intel station, but not when you decipher a transmission. No, y'all take to practice those manually. Yous'll accidentally zoom the map into random spots while trying to turn a radio punch. Messages you're decrypting will force themselves into the darkest corner of the screen, where they're difficult to read (every bit is the infra-scarlet ship detection readout, which is so heavily obscured that I tin't even tell when it's doing anything), and the map itself will flicker and warp. Why can't I delegate any of this? I'm the admiral/prince, tin I really non hire a map guy?

"Why can't I consul whatever of this? I'm the admiral, tin I really not hire a map guy?"

Then there are the battles. Whenever you encounter hostile forces you fight a second aerial battle, manually piloting each ship in high-stakes dogfights over the largely unexplained deserts that make up this Saharan sci fi world. The fighting is terrific. But the camera is awkwardly shackled to your mouse, and the two gigantic HUD readouts blocking the corners have cost me several ships. And while I sympathize why you fight every enemy group with one ship at a time, the transition between them is terrible. You lot can accept a ship retreat, but only past flying to a specific area. That area is likewise random and changes with every ship, and your adjacent transport will vwip onto the screen god knows where. And by "god", I mean "every enemy on the field, instantly". Oh, and without special training, your gunships get into battle without their guns loaded.

And so there are the landing sequences! You accept to manually country every transport you want to refit or repair. These sequences are very absurd but again, apace become an annoying chore, whose only reward is getting back to the rest of the game, but whose penalisation should you screw up ranges from wasted time and money to totally destroying multiple ships. You don't get to choose where your ships begin their descent either: if you land several at once they'll pile on meridian of each other, forcing you to frantically scrabble them out of the way of already parked ships. God assist you if y'all ever try to state a large transport. I've still to come across a landing pad that tin can actually back up my flagship, not that I can even state it without it exploding under its own inertia half the time anyhow. I was actively fugitive landings as much every bit possible within a couple of hours. And the refit screen. And message intercepts. All very absurd systems that just feel annoying.

Convincing a guy to join up. Is fear adept? iono.

HighFleet expects you to work a lot of things out on your ain. Sometimes this is fantastic, like when I learned to fight ane ship at indicate blank range so it couldn't launch missiles without damaging itself, or manipulate an enemy gun platform into shooting downwardly 1 of its ain escorts. The given method for decrypting messages is to rails downwardly four code fragments from downed ships, but I croaky i nada manually by making logical deductions from other information I already had. That's bloody brilliant, and I dear that it's possible - every bit is sending a decoy ship off on a dummy run to throw off a pursuer.

Merely at other times, it just leaves me feeling set up to fail. Is xvi hours likewise long for repairs? How many spare parts can I store? Practice I lose them if a ship goes downwardly? How far northwest does "northwest" mean, or was that NPC lying to me, or do I need a special component to detect this thing? Why did my coiffure's morale go downward after capturing a send? What practice the red flags on the map mean? Is there a manner to view what cargo I take? What difference does my crew'south ethos brand? How exercise I get more than crew? How much ammo should I accept? Why can't I examine my own ships without landing and checking every component manually? Why can't my coiffure reporting a "visual contact" tell me how many ships there are? Why don't I have a notebook to remind me who this guy I've only met is and whether I should care? Can I afford to offend him? What would offend him? It's just endless. Some of these I found answers to, about of them through trial and fault, and HighFleet only allows one save slot.

Information technology probably won't be long before you, likewise, surrender and just crashland your flagship onto your other ships.

Y'all probably already know how you experience about games with only i salvage slot, so permit's not get into that argument now, merely its application in HighFleet added aught simply frustration and a limit to my willingness to experiment. It saves whenever the hell it feels like, often forcing you lot to replay tiresome uneventful sequences, fiddly complicated repair and resupply decisions, and sometimes entire battles once again if you quit. Or find out too late that the "y'all tin restart battles!" that you had listed nether "Proficient:" in your notes was inaccurate, and every restart actually lowers your crew's morale until they reject to fight at all. I also striking a critical, perplexing bug that replaced my single save with one from halfway through the tutorial, but to exist honest past and then I was already washed for the day.

Only here'due south the thing: later, I started again. And not just for this review. HighFleet's battles are terrific. The motion may exist more than sluggish than I'd like, only the fighting is superb. Guns experience hefty, even the minigun way sprays, and impacts are delightful and horrible depending on which end you're on. Because every battlefield is basically a foursquare of sky, they look wonderful, with rain and air current and darkness and lightning being equally gorgeous as they are hazardous. Great clouds of black fume billow from struggling enemies, every explosion feels threatening, and watching a hostile ship'southward pieces spiral or slowly sink on a unmarried doomed engine never gets old. Timing a missile so that it'll fit between your opponent's reloads, deciding to attempt a kamikaze, or getting the drib on a defence so you can bomb them earlier they take off... at that place are delights here.

Nighttime fights are even harder to show off in stills but they look superb!!!one

The campaign side has its draws too. Downed enemy ships get out you with a crash site yous manually salvage, sending your crew out to recover specific elements like fuel, guns, hull parts, intel, or even rescuing bailed out enemies. How much you can recover varies, and some sites are hazardous, asking you lot to risk your crew'southward lives or spend precious time suiting them up. And these sections happen in real time, and so you tin can leave your people to information technology while you directly other ships on the map, or zoom in and lookout as the bland blue map readout changes to a live satellite feed, with visible clouds, burn down, dark/day cycles, and every ship you launch leaving a chemtrail that has its own shadow (doubling the frustration that 95% of map time is spent on the ugly flickery zoomed out angry admiral's foot fodder manner). All-time of all, if y'all downwardly a cargo ship's escorts information technology'll surrender, and you tin fly information technology back to the nearest settlement and sell it off. A large part of the game, in fact, is based around tracking downward these cargo ships and essentially pirating them to fund your war. It's got salvage! Information technology's got piracy! These are the exact things I desire!

I think this is precisely why I'm so frustrated with HighFleet. There's a brilliant game in here somewhere, but in its present state it's buried under countless frustrations and restrictions that do little but irritate me and cut me off from engaging with it the way I desire to. I hate that I don't dear it except in infrequent moments of greatness, and that the frustrations go on piling on at the same charge per unit as I find more than impressive details about it. It'south kitted out for the stars, only but needs some other melody-upwards or two to escape the atmosphere.