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.

Highfleet shipworks download