https://store.steampowered.com/app/1434950/HighFleet/The creator of Hammerfight is out with a new release, and it deserves some exposure, methinks.
It's a weird game, doing its own thing. For better and for worse.
At the core there's aerial combat in semi-enclosed arenas, much like in Hammerfight. Only, no longer are you flying a glorified wooden outhouse, trying to swing a fuckhuge sword on a chain. Now it's clunky rocket-powered pieces of metal that can't decide if they want to be pre-dreadnought battleships or cold war-era moon landers, bristling with cannons and rockets. And maybe a nuke.
Fully ranged combat (with occasional ramming) is not as exhilarating as splitting enemies with an oversized axe. But landing high-calibre salvoes and seeing lumbering behemoths plunge to the ground amid spectacular explosions is satisfying nonetheless.
The fights are always 1 vs many, even though your fleet can be large. This kinda deflates the joy of having a fleet, but is understandable from game-design perspective. There is an option to retreat a damaged vessel during a fight, which lets the next one in queue take over, so it's not entirely pointless to haul those combat ships around.
But even though in the end it always goes down to having to fight some dudes, the main game seems to be played on the fleet simulation layer. It's all about getting into the right fights and avoiding the rest. People compare it to Silent Hunter in this respect. But I've never played that, so can't comment.
You have your fleet, flying around, trying to conquer cities. But you're doing more of a guerilla, or special forces thing, rather than seeking pitched battles. There's a lot of plotting courses, managing fuel reserves and repairs, sending detachments, listening to radio communications and decoding enemy movements; there's shooting cruise missiles (even nuclear) at range and attempting to evade or shoot down the same; hiding from pursuit and surprise attacks on shipping; a bit of exploration. Some of those have their own mini-games attached.
There's a few more layers included: a ship designer, where you can remodel any ship pretty freely; a landing mini-game (much like combat arena w/o shooting), a card-based conversation layer, ship crew promotions, and a radar thingy I'm still trying to figure out.
The setting feels unique. It has a Persian/Turkic-infused cultural setting, vaguely similar to Hammerfight's. Now with added flavours of Russian Empire and post-apocalypse (somebody blew up the Moon at some point, apparently).
The release is refreshingly not-EA, which doesn't mean there aren't any bugs. But at least the game is sold in its complete form.
The whole thing has a very old-school feel to it, both in game design and in how it looks. It can be both intriguing and annoying.
Graphics are nice, occasionally bordering on beautiful, if definitely indie-grade. The screenshots make it look better than it is, it should be said. There's granularity to it that doesn't show on smaller screenshots. The displays are cramped. Some of that might be intentional.
There are some odd choices w/r to saves - the game doesn't autosave on exit, but on certain actions, so it's not impossible to lose some hard-won progress. The manual saving doesn't exist (it classifies itself as a roguelike), but the game lets you make those on capturing certain locations. Finally, every combat or landing can be completely redone if you're not satisfied with it, at the cost of crew morale (depleting which can end you the game).
The many mechanics are kinda obscure and not always explained clearly or exhaustively.
Finally, it's somewhat on the pricey side for an indie release.
Still. I'm yet to get a good grip on how it all works, but so far seems to be worth the money. It's possible, though, that it'll turn out to be one of those games, where the bulk of the fun comes from figuring them out. We'll see.
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Topic: HighFleet - Hammerfight goes dieselpunk and is now a strategy/simulation?? (Read 9725 times)