It briefly lurches into drag as a card game about political speeches from time to time, releases the occasional album as a dexterity-challenging radio espionage simulator, and routinely drops everything to become an utterly gorgeous, if repetitive, game about landing knackered juggernauts in wartorn desert cities.

Because HighFleet is also a fleet management game, a relatively freeform RPG, a sandboxy warship construction sim not unlike Nimbatus, and a survival game. If I had to be reductive, I’d say it felt like The Banner Saga, but with the occasional turn-based fights replaced with inertia-laden, side-on dogfights between brutish airborne cruisers.ĭon’t make me be reductive, though I beg you. It’s just that HighFleet is one of those games which makes itself a headache to categorise, by its insistence on weaving six or seven disparate formats together. In fact, if you ever read an old comic called The Red Star, you’ll find HighFleet has a lot of shared notes in the right places, but without a lot of the fist-in-mouth hamminess which TRS suffered from.Īnd how do you go about prosecuting this war? Well, you had to go and fucking ask, didn’t you? It’s great I will drink this stuff up whenever it is put in front of me. It all feels a lot like the Soviet war in Afghanistan, albeit with a distinctly more pre-1917, Jakub Różalski vibe to the occupying force, and a big bucket of Dune tipped over the lot. The game puts you in the shiny shoes of a young duke and a scion of empire, sent to command a squadron of gigantic steel airships in the suppression of a distant rebellion.

Highfleet shipworks download