Glub, glub. Seems the ice caps have fully melted, and our entire world has gone underwater. Can you sneak into the rich city of Alphaville and leave the planet behind in Highwater? Developed by Demagog Studios, fight your way through insurgents and suited alphas in this turn-based tactics game.
Playing through Highwater, it feels as if the developers want the story to be more emotionally investing than it is. At its current state, it feels jumbled and cut short. New characters are constantly being introduced to you, but no deep emotional bond comes through between them. The story mostly centers around Nikos, an orphan who lost his parents to the catastrophes that led to the world being underwater. The character relationships that Nikos has with others is surface level, never diving deeper into much backstory. There are points that are revealed about other character’s history before the catastrophe, but it’s all nostalgia from the character’s perspective, not the players. With a story being nostalgia-driven the player is left out of it because the emotions involved are all from the past, not from what’s currently happening. And what’s currently happening is pretty bland. Nikos wants to leave the planet out of anger for being an orphan, and the only way out is to travel to Alphaville, the world’s richest city. To be honest, it doesn’t sound like a strong motivating factor to risk your life with, yet people seem to want to join him on the journey.
If there was an actual “evil overlord” that all the anger and revenge could be directed towards, the story would work out more. But since the anger is towards Alphaville, or just the planet in general, the emotional motivation slacks. Perhaps I shouldn’t put all this criticism about the story in here, but it’s seriously half of the game. Highwater is mainly traversal sequences where the radio is playing or the characters are chatting (or both, yikes!) Long chunks of the game are taken up by meaningless chatter that tries really hard to pull some form of emotion from the player. The whole story feels frivolous, though, like it’s one padding sequence after the next. The only way the devs thought to extend gameplay was to have dialog sequences or pull you on meaningless fetch quests.
The combat in Highwater is fine, but after playing Miasma Chronicles and other tactic games, I’d much rather play those instead. The UI is clunky, where tiles can be hard to tell what can be walkable. I also couldn’t find a way to display the enemy’s stats, which would be really helpful in preparing what to do next. Not too much preparation needs to be done, however, because there’s not much your characters can do. Instead of having a variety of interesting moves, the characters are mainly close range. So when you battle tough enemies, you only attack with one character and wait it out with the rest. Not really the desired tactic, I would assume, but devs should prepare for players that take the easiest way to victory rather than the interesting (perhaps more fun) route. There’s also no sneaking up on enemies. The battle starts as soon as you get into close proximity.
I think the biggest gripe I have with Highwater’s gameplay is that there isn’t any pacing. Neither combat nor story have what feels like a natural pace to it. The story pacing was stated earlier: plain and doesn’t involve the player. The gameplay pacing doesn’t have any difficulty curve. That’s not to say Highwater gets difficult. I’ve had to restart battle sequences now and then, but the levels don’t test the player in any kind of strategy. Each battle also has a kind of objective, with a symbol shown on the top right. What this exactly means is difficult to understand. If the round is supposed to be all the player’s characters are supposed to be in a section of the map, why is the game still going on until all the enemies are destroyed? Lack of objective and direction for the round makes for lackluster gameplay.
Besides the tactics gameplay, Highwater has you travel to various points in the world to gather equipment and such. The world is empty, and traveling is just long sequences of holding the button down to move the boat forward. There’s no reason to explore. No reason to do side quests. No point in traveling, really. All the scenes are cut and paste, and there’s no reason to backtrack. The map is also wholly unintelligible. It’s a cutout of a train station map, but that doesn’t make sense because there are no trains and no straight lines to things. And you can’t tell where you are in relation to anything.
I was first pulled in by Highwater’s art, which is a pleasing low-poly perspective with vibrant colors. Some plant models are confusing, as they don’t look as threatening as they should be. The devs did try to add animations and have interesting interactions, but it either felt awkward, or was hard to see with the camera zoomed out. I had to mute the audio, unfortunately. Please, don’t have me try to read dialog while also a radio station is chatting at the same time. I can respect the effort made to show various cultures and the metaphors for people who are having a hard time in the real world, but I’d rather have control over the radio. There were some intense musical scenes, but then there were these annoying audio loops that you couldn’t escape from.
In summary: a padded out story and gameplay with no real direction. Pleasing art with a poor tactical user interface. Music that tried to stir emotions that were lost, and a radio with no power switch.
Jordan played Highwater on PC with a review copy.
