Highwater ١٢+

I had a great few hours playing through Highwater. The graphics are good, the sound design is probably the best I’ve seen, and the combat and exploration are fun and streamlined. I found the difficulty level to be well balanced: easy enough for newcomers to the genre, just hard enough for XCOM veterans to be challenged if they want to do a perfect run, and no penalties either way. Suggestion to devs: the very beginning is a bit off-putting, I almost gave it up within the first five minutes and I would have missed out on a great game! In particular: the first long stretch of driving is boring, maybe start with an action sequence. Also, the white compass dots not disappearing after clearing up an area makes it seem like something was missed. Finally, on the fighting: Nikos is deadweight after the early game, maybe make him more of a true support. And Josephine’s blood lust is super fun to play, but maybe have more obstacles so she can’t too easily eviscerate 5 enemies in one turn.

Overall I was enjoying this game but there are some major game design flaws. For one if you accidentally beach yourself on an island that you can’t interact with there is zero way to fix it besides refreshing the game. The biggest flaw I’ve found is if you happen to take away weapons or boosters from your players there is no way to give them weapons while in mid fight which means that if they have zero weapons and aren’t a character that can punch then the character becomes completely useless in a fight and there is no way to fix it!!! I am pretty much stuck on the fighting sequence with the Vikings because one of my characters has zero weapons so he’s just useless and there is no going back because it is the start of a chapter so the only way for me to fix this would be to completely start over from the chapter before and it’s such a long chapter that I really don’t want to do that and honestly I shouldn’t have to!! I love story heavy games but if you make it frustrating and slow to play because of bad game design the story isn’t going to keep me going! I honestly hope there is a way for this to be fixed because then I might come back to the game but it seriously needs some work on the game design aspects. It feels like the game was made without any sort of play testing and making sure certain actions wouldn’t break the game.

This is a great little game. It’s not long, which I think is fine. The writing is great, with plenty of literary and pop culture references that made me chuckle, even if some went over my head. The radio station with original soundtrack was also excellent. The graphics aren’t super high-res but are decent. The turn-based battles are basically puzzles - the key is to find the right tactics, and although with a few exceptions they aren’t that hard I enjoyed them trying to win them in the fewest turns. I was pleasantly surprised that unlike all the other Netflix games I’ve played I found no bugs, and the game was stable - it didn’t crash on me once. Some other reviewers have complained about bugs, so maybe they’ve all been fixed or maybe I was lucky!