You'll accidentally zoom the map into random spots while trying to turn a radio dial. On the main map screen, you must use little rulers and pencils to make notes, which starts out cute but soon becomes a chore, especially when you realise your crew can apparently programme the map to show enemy flight plans when you capture an intel station, but not when you decipher a transmission. Repetition and a lack of delegation is a big one. In isolation they'd be a grumble-able aside, but I found myself listing them because they were compounding bigger problems. ![]() These are mostly small things, liable to be patched. Although HighFleet's various screens are very pretty, they're uncomfortable and irritating to operate. Accidentally removing a part can't be undone except by undoing every change you've made, or putting it back and waiting while it's reinstalled. ![]() Parts I bought or captured with one ship wouldn't be in my cargo when that same ship moved to the next port. All the parts you can buy are labelled not with names, but indecipherable model numbers. You can, in theory, rebuild any of your ships into whatever you want, connecting structure and armour parts and bolting equipment onto them to your wallet's content. The ship refit screen in particular is so fiddly and fussy that I found myself looking for excuses not to use it. Hunters are coming, so I'll repair this ship's engines, refuel, and flee. I have more notes like this than I'm willing to put a number on. How am I supposed to use the stuff in my cargo? To move my fleet I right click, but when I create a splinter group and right click with that, it deselects them instead". Let me copy an example directly from my notes: "when I click on a module in my cargo in an attempt to attach it to a ship, it instantly sells. Some of it is down to the controls, which are maddeningly inconsistent. But it's the joints between the design and the player where things go wrong. Lush.Īs Nate noted in his preview, it has a lot of moving parts, and they're pretty much all done well. My interceptors launch from a captured port, trailing vapour, to ambush an incoming transport. Bases that see you coming will alert the hunter fleets, so you may want to send your fastest assault ships ahead of the main group to take them out. They'll transmit messages to each other too, which you'll frequently intercept and then decode using a knobbly dial thingy, and then cross-reference with your map to mark their courses and plan your next moves. Those ship movements are vital because some are scary hunter fleets to be feared, and others are valuable supply groups to be plundered. ![]() ![]() Some are enemy intel installations which, when captured, will briefly leak nearby ship movements. Some of those settlements offer cheap fuel, some better parts to reconfigure ships or even build from scratch in its detailed modular system. Your ships must land at settlements to refuel, repair, shop, and refit, and to investigate leads. You lead a fleet of aircraft through hostile territory in a bid to capture a piece of technology that you hope to use as a bargaining chip in a war your side is about to lose. The design is original and for the most part quite excellent. 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. When I play it I'm frequently fighting not the diagetic interface, but the one between it and me. HighFleet's equipment doesn't fail or undermine you the way, say, Deadnaut's does. A degree of frustration is, if not innate, definitely a common design feature of the interface-'em-up.
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