Ah fuck, I thought this shit was hardcore going in. Well in fact it is more like tungsten core! Alright m8s, here is what I have to say about Highfleet after about 3 hours in which I finished the prologue (and some additional time that I needed to recover from the PTSD this game gave me):
The game (from the gameplay perspective) can be divided into two main parts: the extremely skill dependent combat + landing (2D WASD shooter) and extremely knoweledge dependent fleet control part (the map + subsystems stuff), really I can imagine both parts as separate games that would be both pretty cool in their own right.
There is also dialogue "battle" part and economy part (buying and selling shit to keep the fleet supplied and in good state repair). Very improtant thing is that while there are some save points, they are fairly rare. You can repeat any combat and landings as many times as you want (seems good right?), but there are penalties for morale and (I think) you also don’t regain stuff like missiles that you fired in previous attempts (so not so good actually). This means that basically any fight or even landing has a chance of fucking you over and ending the campaign playthrough due to not having resources for repairs and refueling. Its brutal as fuck.
Combat:
- this shit is immensely brutal and cool at the same time
- there are many types of ships in the game (and you can design your own), which play very differently (ie fast and agile ships can doge missiles and enemy fire, huge cruisers just barely hang in the air, but can shoot down incoming missiles with point defence weapons and devastate enemies with their big guns and missile launchers)
- there are weather effects, smoke and debris from explosions, falling wrecks can collide with other craft etc, tons of really good shit
- its hectic, you have to pay attention to incoming missiles and enemies while manoeuvring and aiming, launching countermeasures etc, you really have to git gud to have any chance here (I can see the combat being really way too much for some people to handle)
- its a pity that the skirmish mode is not in the game yet (supposedly coming soon), people really need to be able to train and git gud in combat - as it is, you need to learn things as you go in the campaign
Fleet control
- Even with the help of the manual some of the more complex systems (well, actually all of them are complex lol) probably require some more in-depth explanations (which the game doesn’t supply unfortunately), hopefully some youtube vids will appear sooner rather than later
- There is no hand holding, the game fully expects you to mark contacts and bearing with pencil and ruler on the map, maybe even do some actual calculations regarding enemy travel times and stuff like that (kinda like the "calculate your own firing solution" stuff in Silent Hunter)
- the subsystems work together in pretty cool ways (radar finds a contact, comms intercept radio traffic, which can give you speed and destination of the contact etc), though I can see now that this shit would require way more information for the player to make effective use of this, figuring all the shit out will be p. hard (there are some tutorials in the prologue, but those are by no means adequate)
- All this shit matters and is extremely high-stakes (in the main campaign there are multiple super strong fleets that hunt you over the huge map, they have nuclear missiles and airplanes that will literally vaporise your ass if the ever get within 2 000 km of your pathetic "fleet" and any enemies that come into contact with you will call these fleets), proper way of playing would see you carefully monitoring the airwaves for traffic, sneaking around the enemy radars and launching sneaky attacks on enemy cities to gain more supplies - in practice until you get solid idea on how stuff works (assuming it works as intended and there aren’t bugs/broken stuff), you will get fucked pretty hard pretty often
So yeah, its brutal, harsh, complex but at the same time highly skill dependent (ie ideal player should be a huge nerd with chad reflexes and top-notch situational awareness, which is IMO pretty unusual mix). I certainly want to learn more and figure out how shit works so I can play more effectively. Its honestly an extremely rough gem, a true indie game in good and the bad - it would really need several hours worth of tutorials for all the systems and proper combat training mode. I understand that this was done in some Russian´s garage (which makes it all the more impressive) and so the amount of support will be limited (as I said above, I hope that people will eventually make some walkthroughs on how stuff works and post the vids on youtube) though.
In any case, I warn anyone who wants to get into this: its literally a game that might have stepped out of a time machine from circa 1993, its complex as fuck and gives no fucks about whether you understand whats going on (read the manual, but dont expect it to be sufficient - its more like the bare minimum). Expect to have to do your own research and experiment. Expect to fail a lot before you manage to achieve anything noteworthy. And even if you figure shit out, expect to be fucked hard if you can’t handle the combat.
This is a game into which one could invest a ton of time and still end up sucking at it and being frustrated. The big question will be the post launch support – the skirmish mode needs to happen, if there are bugs (as I would expect to be) they will need to be fixed… I can already hear people screaming for all kinds of changes and tweaks (“Let me skip combat!” “Let me skip all this nerdy shit with pencils and stuff!”), I am curious to see what the dev is about to do with that.
Also the art is great, story seems cool...
In any case, this is IMO the most interesting indie release of this year so far.