The problem is everything else associated with combat-the connective tissue. The act of fighting fits the game nicely. Controlling the ships is a constant tug-of-war with gravity, and reload times and ship damage are just on the edge of difficult and frustrating. There's neat weather effects, like raindrops hitting your viewscreen, wailing music to fit the Russian/west Asian vibe of the game, and booming gunshots.
There can be multiple enemies on-screen at a time, but it's only ever just your one ship which, when it gets destroyed or retreats, is replaced by the next one in your list, until every ship's taken care of.Ĭombat looks and feels great. You can have several of them, but you only actually control one at a time, in a twin-stick shooter-style piece of air combat WASD to move, mouse to aim and then fire, with afterburners and missiles and flares and so on. Your fleet has a certain number of smaller ships, like frigates and corvettes, which you control during fights. Every new system I encounter adds to my confusion, not my fantasy of playing as an airship commander-except the card and dialogue-based diplomacy system, which is straightforward and effective. But the confusion doesn't exactly abate in the main campaign. Some of this is down to a poor tutorial, where you're taught things you can do without learning why. There's a whole system for launching stealth attacks, but I can barely even see how or why that matters. I get a tutorial that has me learn how to intercept transmissions, for instance, but once I start intercepting those transmissions on my own I have no idea what they do or mean. The core problem with HighFleet is that every mini-game has astrolabe-like obstacles. It was terrible-so it got removed from the version of Pirates! you've probably seen. No, that version of Pirates! had an astrolabe mini-game, where you'd use the historical device to figure out your longitude and latitude, and then look at a map in the manual.
These mini-games were fun! With one exception: In the original 1987 version, if you were lost in the Caribbean, you didn't just pull up an in-game map. Just as HighFleet is bursting with systems, Pirates! was packed with mini-games that, tied together, created a story of swashbuckling pirates swinging across galleon decks to duel evil Spaniards and woo governors' daughters.
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