Highwater Review

thesixthaxis.com:

Highwater is a story-driven tactical strategy game set in a ruined and flooded world. You play as Nikos as he sets off in his dinghy to try and reach Alphaville, where he plans to sneak onto a rocket that the ultra rich are using to escape the ruined Earth they destroyed. While it might be a premonition from the future and it looks good on a surface level, there is a lack of polish and depth here that undercuts the game’s better qualities.

First things first, Highwater really does look rather nice. Using a cartoon style and bright colours, Highwater presents a surprisingly pretty apocalypse where almost everything is flooded and the few bits of land are the shattered, decrepit ruins of fallen civilisation, full of convenient newspapers to give you a little backstory. People are generally living in run-down shacks on tiny bits of land or machinery that certainly wouldn’t pass health and safety these days, but what else can you do when you’re basically in Waterworld, without the mutants or Kevin Costner?

The only problem is that, once the initial novelty wears off, there isn’t really that much to see. You spend the majority of your time outside of combat in your little rubber dinghy as you slowly make your way through the world, which mostly means heading towards a yellow dot on your compass, or maybe an optional white one whenever they show up. In the meantime you’ve got occasional islands, a few conveniently preserved street lights so you’ve got a path to follow, some very repetitive ruins, and so on. Initially, with the game’s radio turned on, the effect is quite calming, but it doesn’t take long before you wish the dinghy was faster, or the objective closer. There isn’t much incentive to explore because everywhere you go in each area of the game looks the same.

The music on the radio is an eclectic mix of styles, so while this original soundtrack is a bit hit-and-miss, it has a certain kind of charm to it. A few tracks miss the nebulous requirements for getting me to