I’m quite excited that we now know it’ll be out in two weeks, on July 27th. I like everything about the look of this, and Nate’s HighFleet preview from May only gave me more reasons to be cheerful. He played it for a few hours and, while wishing it was a little less labour-intensive, found each of its separate elements brilliant on their own terms. “Don’t make me be reductive, though; I beg you,” writes Nate. “Because HighFleet is also a fleet management game, a relatively freeform RPG, a sandboxy warship construction sim not unlike Nimbatus, and a survival game. It briefly lurches into drag as a card game about political speeches from time to time, releases the occasional album as a dexterity-challenging radio espionage simulator, and routinely drops everything to become an utterly gorgeous, if repetitive, game about landing knackered juggernauts in wartorn desert cities.” Me, I like being reductive and I like a game where I can send big bots into battle then use the spoils of victory to upgrade the big bots. Throw in some diplomacy and those lovely, tactile looking switches and it’s basically a dream game. I still think about Sub Commander a lot, a carefully simulated ASCII submarine game I played seven years ago, and HighFleet looks to me like that, but in the sky, and with art. It’s also the most exciting of the slate of games under development/publishment by the revived Microprose. I care not for Carrier Command 2. You can find HighFleet over on Steam for wishlisting and more screenshots.
