I know for sure that I never asked myself “what if you cross” Sid Meier’s pirates with the 1992 dune Adventure Strategy Game, ”but it turns out at least one person has because I’ve played Konstantin Koshutin and Microprose High fleet this week on the PC PC and this is kind of what is it.
kind of. I hope you are willing to let me describe exactly how High fleet works because one of the most important things to understand here is that it is like nothing else out there. I started this game and was instantly lost, not just because it takes you to the deep end of its story, but because everything that brings it together is so weird and weird and new that I didn’t have any references to fall back on . There’s no such thing as “Oh, I know this type of game, I’ll just do this”.
High fleet takes place in a dirty diesel punk future that looks and feels like a World War I story written by Frank Herbert. You are part of a large empire operating against a rebel province, and you are in command of a huge, large flying fortress that serves as a flagship and can accommodate and deploy many smaller ships at the same time.
When I say you’re in charge, I mean it. Much of the game is spent above your station (above), with a map that you interact with by drawing courses (that see your ship heading towards them in real time), radio messages that you have to intercept manually by using the Turn dials and a huge lever labeled OPEN that you have to pull when it’s time to get off the ship. It’s all incredibly direct and practical.
G / O Media can receive a commission
What is a concept High fleet wearing on your sleeve because most of the things in this game need to be done they to do them. In a Lunar Lander-style mini-game, when it’s time to land somewhere, ships have to be manually landed and if you screw it up they take damage that you have to pay for. And when it’s time to fight, you don’t casually issue orders or have the luxury of taking turns; Battles are fought in real time with tense (and increasingly difficult) arcade action, with no option to skip it or delegate responsibility.
Add a strong survival element as your fleet is in constant need of money, fuel, and repairs, and High fleet will be fast very stressful.
But wait, there’s more. A story that unfolds through dialogue sequences doubles as a diplomacy system in which you travel through hostile countries to ally with the locals, meet newly arrived colleagues, and confront enemies. Saying the wrong thing at one point can cost you a helping hand in a fight or upset someone so badly that it has direct ramifications for your campaign.
Oh, and there’s also a sturdy shipbuilding and customization thing to bury your head in anytime, where you can customize the ships you get and design entirely new ones by choosing each and every armor, engine and weapon, which are built into them, with the attributes of each part reflected in their performance in combat.
That’s a lot of stuff thrown together, a lot of it seems to wear me down, and all of my time with High fleet spent imagining its creators simply telling me, “shit, this is the game we made” every time I thought about complaining that something didn’t feel right or was too difficult.
Which I’ve done quite a lot because of the eccentricities of this game can get Yes, really annoying. The arcade action got pretty boring for me pretty quickly, as did the landing mini-game; I appreciate that they are there and that there are people who are very into this stuff every time in the name of immersion, but over the course of a large single player campaign I don’t want to have to fight every single battle or take it every time take part in a glorified parking simulation whenever I needed some fuel.
A lot of time is spent just idling for refueling and repairs, the diplomatic stuff feels pretty thin (and sometimes completely random), and while the shipbuilding stuff is mostly cool, it’s also full of annoying little UI- Problems that makes it a lot fiddier than it needs to be.
I always feel like these annoyances would be game breakers for me under almost any other circumstance, but here they just feel like a part of it High fleets World, the setting, art and game design fit the general feeling of hostility so perfectly. In a vast desert where giant airships are held together with rusty bolts and everything catches fire with the slightest flight of sparks, where the world is barren and all your technology looks like something from the 70s that was dug up and repaired in the 90s, Naturally things will be hard and unforgiving.
I suffer because my men suffer. And when I succeed in spite of everything and I’ve worked my ass off intercepting a hostile message, manually planning an interception course on the map, and then launching a successful attack that I have directly controlled, it feels like unbelievable.
And wild and wonderful and, strangely enough, considering everything I said above, beautiful. I can’t finish these impressions without mentioning how damn good this game looks. It’s full of fantastic dune-like character art, the environments oozing with stormy sand Moods, the weather effects are great and the pixel art ships look damn cool. There’s even a dithering effect turned on by default that really bakes in the retro-futures aesthetic that you can turn off if you want, but it looks very suitable when it is left on.
High fleet is the first game of the “new” Microprose that I have played and I have to say that I am surprisingly impressed with their selection. It’s easy to say that these kind of modern publisher rebrandings are nothing more than licensing deals for the sake of nostalgia, but from the setting to the brutality to the tremors, it really feels like Microprose 2021 is the kind of game published. actually survived until 2021.
.