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Highfleet is an interesting mix of an arcade shooter and a military mix. It has good atmosphere, presentation, but falls short on playability. It is a good game which is worthy of your time if you can handle steep learning curve and military jargon.

What to look for in this game

Conversation system

It is an unique and interesting system. I consider it to be among the best in gaming industry even when compared to story heavy games.

Dialogue
• This system is very interesting and feels a lot less gamey than in many other games, including RPG games focused on story lines like Mass Effect. Conversation system is about trying to convince other princes to join you. You have to try and figure out what they like and what they do not. You can get yourself an edge with gifts acquired throughout your campaign which is a nice touch.
  
  This is where game starts to show its limitations. You do not know what each person likes and the only way to find out is a hard one. In reality you would have advisors telling you that an individual is known for. An ability to get clues about person's world views. However in this game all of this remain guess work.
  
  There is a good example in this game. One of a random in-game conversation is downright ridiculous and very arbitrary. One of the princes had asked to translate holy text to him. I had translated it was written. He get upset at me and left. Just why? This is not how humans behave. At most I should get opinion penalty with him and bonus to my worldview stats.
  
  Worldview
  
• Your world view is formed by actions which you take throughout the campaign. There is no arbitrary good/bad karma here. You can be cruel and be rewarded for it realistically. You will only be known as cruel and in return, you won't be able to take kind decisions in conversations.
  
  Skill checks are based on your worldview, if you are always picking some options like being cruel, when a conversation skill check comes for a cruel action, you will automatically pass that, because you are naturally cruel. If you try to balance your character, it will be a chance based roll. The more heavily you lean into that trait, the better are chances to convince others of your worldview. This system is leagues ahead of most conversation systems in other games.
  
  Sadly, worldview forces you to a certain view rather than allowing you to be neutral and excel at having a neutral worldview. In other words, it is always best to min/max your attitude on the world. Be as bias as possible!

Presentation

Good looking people usually are shallow.

Graphical User Interface
• Game excels in its presentation. GUI itself is immersive and represents a cockpit of a military vehicle. Lift up sounds, screen shaking, missile detection. All of these sounds and effects create an impression that you are in a cabin behind a real ship. At the same time game tends to clog up your screen with no way to hide it. It is especially noticeable when resolution on a main screen is small and you can't zoom in at all.
  
  Visual Effects
  
• Game does its own effects well. Thrusters feel powerful when you land, spewing flames like a dragon's fire. High caliber ammunition thunders from your barrels and sends enemy ships to hell, lost in ensuing explosion which obscures their ship. When small caliber guns fire, it fills the air with lead. When missiles explode, they explode violently. When nuke is coming, you are afraid of it. Nothing in this game feels as half done. Effects are wonderfully presented visually.
  
  Sound
  
• All of this is followed by a sound. When nukes drop, an air siren plays. It creates an atmosphere of impending danger. Guns have their own appropriate sounds, from small caliber high frequency buzzing to thunderous roar of 180 mm artillery guns. Engines roar as they try to slow down your descent or are trying to lift your ship into the air.
  
  War crimes
  
• Game has a clever way to discourage use of nukes. It is most potent weapon, able to annihilate whole enemy groups with one strike. Once you start using them, enemy will nuke you in return with far greater arsenal. Use of nukes against civilian targets label you as a war criminal and will make cities unusable to you as a waypoint except for refuelling.
  
  War crime system in this game is broken and does not make any sense. Enemy will consistently nuke you on their own after a certain period. However, their nukes do not destroy the city. They do not get penalties or do not care that they are destroying their own world consistently. However, if you just dear to respond in kind, you will be labelled as a war criminal. Just what? This world is undergoing nuclear winter. It is going through one sided nuclear exchange. Yet here we are lead to believe that we are bad guys for responding in kind?

This game is notoriously difficult to learn. One person told me that he had spent 20 hours just learning. Underlying mechanics under the HUD are simple, but you will have to learn it in the worse way possible.

Tutorial
• You will be thrown right into tutorial as you start the game. It is good one. It is an actual part of the story which helps you to learn the ropes. However, it only tells you the basics before throwing you into the world to die. Prologue needs to be expanded and be its own part of a game. A mini campaign which would introduce everything to you. As it stands now, game practically leaves you clueless.
  
  Tutorial has pop up events where admiral shows you what most buttons do when you might need them, but he does not tell us why we should use them, only how. This leaves a game where you know how to get around, but have no clue of underlying mechanics below the surface level.
  
  It is a shame also since developer had proven that he can make a good tutorial. Prologue could be expanded to its own full blown mini-campaign in which player is introduced to each mechanic one by one while at the same time being engaged in a main story line and dialogue. Game could be so much better and remove its main obstacle of entry. However, I doubt that developer is open to an actual feedback on his game.
  
  Barren Tooltips
  
• Game leans heavily on a military sim aspects. It shuns its arcade roots and tries to be taken as something else. Unfortunately, it severely lacks any meaningful information. Tooltips often do not crucial information like:
  
  
  1. What is a range of warhead?
     
  2. What is its payload?
     
  3. What is reload rate of a weapon?
     
  4. What is armor piercing qualities?
     
  5. What is heat signature of your fleet?
     
  6. What is a radar cross section of your fleet?
  
  Basic information like this is left out of reach for a player. It tries to be something it is not and ends up only confusing most of its player base. If it wants to be a nice dumb arcade rogue light, it is fine. However, when you start mixing in military simulation and ship design into the mix, this information becomes crucial to see in game rather than to theory-craft and datamine your way to something as simple as tooltip information

This game tries to be a military simulator to its own detriment. Mechanics which it does introduce often end up confusing the player. At the same time these mechanics do not provide much gameplay depth as game likes to make each element more of a minigame than innate element of gameplay.

As a simulator it is wholefully inadequate. This only serves to make this game more obtuse and to alienate its more casual audience who are looking for an arcade game. Game misses on a lot of key aspects in making it easy to learn and in creating meaningful mechanics.

A Hybrid
• Game tries to be many things. A military sim, arcade tank shooter, rogue-light game. Such wide range of identities means that this game does not do either thing well. As a military sim, it is quite bare, lacking on details and proper simulations. As an arcade game it is too complex and will cause only confusion and frustration to an average player. As a rogue-light game, it suffers from ship building aspect which completely trivialise the challenge as people min/max in game mechanics. Furthermore, abrupt shift towards completely different kind of a gameplay and the last part will throw most people off balance. Neither in-game systems support such kind of gameplay. For example, no control over towns you own, no ability to track enemy fleet in a wide radius and to prevent them from nuking you besides blind luck or bad AI.
  
  Dramatic shift in gameplay
  
• Game changes drastically when you finally reach Khiva. From a hit and run piracy you become a pseudo ruler. This is in no way reflected in game mechanics remain the same and what is new is poorly explained. It is done so bad that you do not even get a chance to re-arm and repair your ships after a though battle. This leaves you in a scenario where you asked to expand quickly and engage enemy groups, but you cannot.
  
  There is no reflection that you now own cities. They do not report enemy positions. You do not get to leave a garrison. You cannot effectively monitor vast distances involved in protecting the capital. On the other hand, enemies spawn with nuclear strike capable ships just few towns away. You are put on a wild chase to capture those towns and find those strike groups. However, there is no possible way to ensure that non of those ships slip past the blockade. You do not have time. You do not have space. You do not have any in-game mechanics to aid you in this quest. Game becomes more about luck and bad AI who forgets to nuke Khiva.
  
  Game is also bugged at this point. Story tells you how you should not let battle groups to nuke the city. For this you need to secure points around Khiva. You are even given health meter. However, enemies never nuke their own objective. Even when nukes are flying into the city, it just does not take any damage.
  
  Finale
  
• Finale is just bad. Instead of just winning after reaching the end, you are instead are given completely different set to rules to play with. This game is confused on what it wants to be. It wants to be an arcade game. It wants to be a military simulation. It wants to be a rogue-light. However, it does all of these things worse than what you expect from each of these games. It is a confused love child of a developer which made a game for himself just the way he likes it.
  
  Radio Transmissions
  
• These are random in-game generated transmissions which appear at certain points. You can't organically acquire them and tailor your strategy to traffic chatter. This makes them quite pointless, especially as there is a massive amount of useless information available. How I'm supposed to track a merchant when I get single transmission of where he roughly is? Often you do not even get its route.
  
  Messages itself are made more useless as some parts of them are just cut, often key parts which are most important. Just why? I had never seen a game which introduces a mechanic and then goes out of its way to make that mechanic pointless. Even signal itself is imprecise, there is no strength given, bearing is only an estimate. You are supposed to mark that information on your screen, but when you can't get any precise information about the target, it might as well be a guess work. You make a mental note of where everyone is and it is as good as this in game mechanic with radio, pen and pencil gets.
  
  What radio transmission lack are strength of a transmission in order to specify how far away target is. Game needs to represent Doppler effect in order to get movement of a target. You also need to get those traffic messages organically, set list of radio waves which military and truckers use. As of now, this mechanic is quite pointless in this game. The only time it helps is when a trucker outright says where it is going. Same applies to strike groups. All the other messages are useless. There is no reason to draw their trajectories as you do not get enough information for that, just make a mental note and you are as good as you can get.
  
  Radar/ELINT
  
• System on a whole is quite good. Sadly, it is not detailed at all which makes this system very vague and less useful than it could be. There are just some issues with it:
  
  
  • You cannot get precise bearing on an object.
    
  • You cannot get its signal strength.
    
  • ELINT danger is too vague.
  
  Game lacks relevant information to make radar interplay relevant. In addition, as a game is largely dependent on close encounters, radar in itself is quite useless. Enemy will either close in or fire ballistic missiles at you.
  
  There is no intermediary range combat nor anti-missile defence systems. Ballistic missiles (a lot of them are called as cruise missiles despite them having range of a ballistic missiles) have insane range and then you are armed just with regular missiles which range in this game is pathetic. You lack cruise missiles which would serve as a bridge between short and long range weaponary and would allow radar to be more useful overall. It would not be an understatement to call radar useless in this game, just use target acquisition radar and forget about search radar all together.
  
  Infrared detection system
  
• Talk about radar being useless! This little fellow does not even work properly. Its HUD element does not show enemies on screen, just gives you a warning about them. As a radar, it lacks any meaningful detail to be useful. Weather conditions, clouds, heat signature, etc. In this game infrared system is just your basic vision. In this game most missiles are supposed to be infrared, but there is a complete lack of interaction between their seekers and your fleet or an environment.
  
  Trigger happy AI
  
• AI in this game is completely unrealistic. It fires on any radar signature a heat seeking ballistic missile. This means that in this world militaries are blowing up radio stations, radio enthusiasts, planes and anything in between out of the sky for use of a radio. Worse, they fire massive heat seeking ballistic missiles at a range of ten of thousand of kilometres. They are routinely blowing up their own infrastructure and commerce with their own armaments. This also contributes to an unrealistic atmosphere where game is solely about you and them and it is painfully obvious that this is not a living world.

In any game will be made a lot better where you can actually design your own units. Highfleet is not an exception to that. Though, I do have a nagging suspicion that developer's favourite food is spaghetti as you could judge from his code in this mode. Engine is bugged, often not creating right elevations for your guns. Other times it fails to connect wiring to your parts. Doing the exact same thing somehow manages to fix all the issues.

2+2=3?
• Another problem is with developer's math. A lot of parts are of inconsistent weight. Going by 1x1 cubes is a lot better since they have more hitpoints, but slightly lower weight. They accept any item as 2x1 block would do. Furthermore, they have an added advantage of sucking up more damage than bigger blocks. The issue is that this game does not simulate or represents penetration mechanics. A hit is a hit and it destroys a module. If there is more damage than module has health, all that damage just disappears.
  
  This creates an unrealistic and tedious gameplay environment where you have to put countless small modules rather than using bigger modules.
  
  Min/maxing
  
• Ship building in general is cheesy and heavily promotes min/maxing. Partly, because your support ships will never be in combat. Only defending against missile strikes. This means that the only thing which people bother to add are 37 mm autocannons for point blank defence against missiles.
  
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717747526
  https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717747323
  
  Another issue is that game was balanced around very poorly made base ships. Game is hard then, but once you make your own custom ships, you can trivialise whole campaign. Due to primitive in game combat and primitive ship builder, game heavily incentivises to build min/max'ed ships. There are just my very first attempts, but they are already superior to many ships I saw in-game or online. They could be even better if I would take away minimal precautions which I had given to them.
  
  Arcade builder
  
• Another issue is that the whole ship building aspect is primitive. It does not consider construction strength and thus you can put thousands of tons on 1x1 aluminium block and it will do just fine. Or how planes requires just a flat surface to be placed. This means that any ship can be a carrier as long as it has some unused flat space on its surface. From smallest frigates to biggest battleships. There is no consideration for your ammo storage. It is all free and infinite. There is no need for reloading systems. There is no need for storage space for your aircraft. There is no need for runway length for your aircraft. There is no structural strength requirements. Since in-game system is so primitive as not to require underbelly hangars or runaways, you can take smallest interceptor, add a jet fighter on its head and this will work just fine. Ship building in this game is just ridiculous.

Game is lacking many quality of life features. Clicking in an interface is tricky. You can't easily place a part, you can't mirror your ship in ship builder, you cant re-arm your ship in a shipworks without changing design of a ship. So prepare to see plenty of this in your playthroughs:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717956962

This issue is caused by inability to quickly re-arm your ship in game or to prioritise repairs of most pressing parts. You then have to do this manually and each time you will be required to save a new blueprint even if all you did was to put another ballistic missile into the tube.

In this example, you can't move highlighted ship around. You also cannot freely move camera upwards then zoomed. This means that sometimes your ship will go beyond borders of what you are seeing.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717748945


Bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere. This game has bugs for days! Despite several last patches were focused on refining and debugging this game, it still have them a plenty. Especially in ship building menu.

Spotting Bug

Game actually has a quite nasty spotting bug. When you are being detected by town garrison, your location will be broadcasted. However, AI do not just receive your position. It sees you quite some time afterwards. This raises issues if there are missile carriers nearby they will launch ballistic missile strikes one after another right on your precise location. It does not matter where you try to run, how you try to dodge, missiles will always come straight at you until AI uses up its ammunition and your position becomes invisible to it after some time.

In order to recreate it, just have missile carrier nearby and get detected by the garrison. After that get attacked by missile carrier. Then 'atl+f4', do the same action, but after being detected, move to completely different direction. AI will always know the direction which your ships are going. This way you can see that AI is cheating in this game.

Hull connection bug

This is a bug where your ship just fails to register a viable connection to other elements of a hull. It tends to happen when you briefly disconnect something.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717748178

The solution to fix this is bug is simply trying to connect modules again. Remove random objects at the area which fails to be detected and try to connect it again.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717748277

Inability to place objects into the hull

Sometimes shipworks will bug out and you will be unable to put modules into the hull which you should be able to.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717747826

The solution is simply to remove surrounding modules. Maybe shift order in which you add those modules. Eventually you will be able to add them.

Wiring bug

Game is inconsistent. Sometimes it won't allow you to wire through objects, sometimes it will. Previously I was not allowed to put turret here, because it had no electricity/ammo. I changed absolutely nothing, just kept trying the same thing just removing and adding those modules again in their original places until I was able to solve this bug.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717747115

Firing Arc bug

There is a bug where firing arcs of your guns are inconsistently generated. Sometimes they will be generated correctly, sometimes other objects will get in their way. Here my autocannon cannot shoot past another gun.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717746374

I changed absolutely nothing and now all my weapons can fire past each other.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717746255

Inconsistent behaviour

Here you can see that shipworks can wire electricity through missile tubes and engines. This is counter intuitive as electricity should not be wired through objects, but only through free hull elements.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2717748667

(How fitting is that a bug about inconsistent behaviour gets a bug from Steam itself which fails to properly portray a link as it should)


This game has an outstanding visual representation which punches way above its weight. Amorphism of various HUD elements into its real life analogues adds to an atmosphere. Weather effects, landing under difficult conditions, high caliber impacts. These things are amazingly presented in this game. Game has a lot to offer to a dedicated gamer as it has a lot of depth in its mechanical gameplay. It will take many hours just to learn how to play just by following tutorials online. Then you have dozen hours long campaign and shipworks adds a lot of replayability to the main game mode. To select few, it will be a matter on making the best ship designs online.

To everyone else, I can't recommend this game. I did not had fun in this game. Game does a very poor job introducing player in its own gameplay. Vanilla ships often are extremely bad. Sevastapool (Your vanilla flagship) is actually so bad that many consider it to be a main factor why campaign is so difficult in a first place. If you are someone who wants to just have fun with its game, this is not it. You are looking at, at least 20 hours learning curve. Afterwards in-game mechanics become just tiresome.