HighFleet - Desert Russians Fight With Warships In Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

[agris]

Haba the UI continues to look amazing, what aspects do you think will get old fast?

 

[Haba]

Haba the UI continues to look amazing, what aspects do you think will get old fast?

The various minigames, the oil-stain effect for dialogue. Stuff like that.

 

[Gondolin]

The various minigames, the oil-stain effect for dialogue. Stuff like that.

The "intercept message" minigame looked a bit too much for me. There's plenty to do in the game already.

 

[udm]

It's done by the same guy who also made Hammerfight. That was a fun 2D game of steampunk flying contraptions swinging massive swords, flails and whatnot at each other. A bit rough around the edges in some ways, but the action was quite fun. Bodes well for this game, I guess.

Oh daaaaayum Hammerfight is one of my favourite indie games (like indie indie). Going to wishlist this but I'm pretty optimistic.

EDIT: Skimmed through some gameplay footage. I can certainly see the similarities, especially in visuals and sound effects. Anyway I'm glad Konstantin managed to get Microprose to publish his new game. He deserves better.

 

[Infinitron]

Coming July 27th.

 

[CyberModuled]

Damn, they even got a manual.

http://www.microprose.com/downloads/manuals/highfleet/HF_user_manual_v06c.zip

 

[agris]

My god what year is this, it’s actually a good manual, too. In the vein of renaissance games.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

FUUUUG, this brings me way back. I am fucking pumped for this, hopefully the game is at least as good as the manual itself!

The number of sub-systems the game has (radar/radar jamming, IR detection, radio interception) is pretty impressive tbh fam, it remains to be seen if the execution is good enough...

 

[karoliner]

The guy mostly makes videos about real life submarines and videogames about submarines.

 

[Melcar]

A manual? Well shit.

 

[Nutria]

The guy mostly makes videos about real life submarines and videogames about submarines.

You know you're watching a good channel when the guy has to stop every couple minutes and think about whether what he's about to say is still classified.

I watched about the first hour of it and everything looked great except the combat system. I don't play games like that so I'd probably be terrible at it. I agree with him that difficulty levels would be good in this kind of game. Preferably something where I can choose to make the tactical battles easier but the strategic level harder to compensate for it.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

I loved the decoding minigame in Sid Meier's Covert Action, so the radio interception stuff looks pretty good to me. Honestly lot of the systems shown in the video look more complex than the stuff in Cold Waters for example, which is great. And the ship construction part could be a game on its own pretty much. The combat is a bit of a question mark at this point, but I guess it should be manageable, in any case I will be getting it right on release.

 

[agris]

The guy mostly makes videos about real life submarines and videogames about submarines.

dcfedor given your love of skeuomorphic UIs and crunchy interaction panels, I didn’t want to risk this game going under your radar. It’s out tomorrow, but this video does a good job of highlighting the UI. Everything is usable, down to the rulers and pencils.

 

[kirin]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/highfleet-review

A degree of frustration is, if not innate, definitely a common design feature of the interface-'em-up. HighFleet's equipment doesn't fail or undermine you the way, say, Deadnaut's does. When I play it I'm frequently fighting not the diagetic interface, but the one between it and me. When I'm unsure of what strategy I should be pursuing it's not because of the challenges the game presents, but because I have too little context for most of those challenges to make a meaningful decision.

https://kotaku.com/highfleet-is-kicking-my-ass-in-the-best-way-possible-1847359863

That’s a lot of stuff just thrown together, much of it seemingly designed to wear me down, and my entire time with Highfleet was spent imagining its creators simply telling me “fuck you this is the game we made” every time I thought about complaining that something didn’t feel right or was too hard.

game journalists complaiining that the Game is Too Hard

 

[udm]

What the fuck is "interface-'em-up"? What the hell does "diagetic" mean? Jesus Christ, man, these pseudo-intellectuals...

 

[gerey]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/highfleet-review

A degree of frustration is, if not innate, definitely a common design feature of the interface-'em-up. HighFleet's equipment doesn't fail or undermine you the way, say, Deadnaut's does. When I play it I'm frequently fighting not the diagetic interface, but the one between it and me. When I'm unsure of what strategy I should be pursuing it's not because of the challenges the game presents, but because I have too little context for most of those challenges to make a meaningful decision.

https://kotaku.com/highfleet-is-kicking-my-ass-in-the-best-way-possible-1847359863

That’s a lot of stuff just thrown together, much of it seemingly designed to wear me down, and my entire time with Highfleet was spent imagining its creators simply telling me “fuck you this is the game we made” every time I thought about complaining that something didn’t feel right or was too hard.

game journalists complaiining that the Game is Too Hard

The subhuman faggots over at RPS whining about it is the highest form of praise the game could receive.

If those vermin are complaining the devs must have done something right.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Its out, time to get into this!

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Parsimonious cook]

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.

 

[agris]

Nice writeup Parsimonious cook! Unfortunately it has issues on older systems/OS. There’s a flock of us Win7 users who are crashing at the first landing in the tutorial.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

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.

Woah man you're making this very enticing.

 

[Van-d-all]

Played for just under 30 minutes, and while the game is oozing atmosphere (sitting somewhere between W40K's Tallarn and Deserts of Kharak) I can see the lander minigame getting old really fast, especially landing every fucking single craft by hand. Combat is a faster version of Airships: Conquer The Skies skewed towards inertia like Koshutin's previous game, Hammerfight. The game is hard, which I like, but both of those minigames are heavily arcade, quite different from MicroProse games of old, and so far I'm not too fond of the game overall. Hope the management/strategy parts will balance it out in favour for me.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

You need to land only the craft that you want repaired, others can be refueled without landing.

 

[Van-d-all]

You need to land only the craft that you want repaired, others can be refueled without landing.

I suspected as much, but still I think it's a rather pointless tedium. I'd rather spend that time playing the Harpoon part.

 

[downwardspiral]

The game is very arcade.
The shooting combat is surprisingly fun.
However, not sure if it is intended or I miss something, you can't choose which ship you control or the formation of your ship during the BVR missile interception.
Thus, if enemy missile target your ship with high RPM guns and you happen to control it, then you going to easily defeat all incoming missiles. But if not you going to waste a few AAM.