If you were to take Risk and add resource gathering and management to it along with the ability to fortify regions against attacks, you'd get something like Burrito Studios' Highlands. It's a strategy game of territory control with RPG elements and it's absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, although it's fun overall, there are some things about the mechanics which feel unnecessary.
The main characters of the story are members of the royal family of a kingdom spread across a bunch of floating islands. At the beginning of the game, the kingdom gets invaded. Ousting the invaders and recovering lost territory therefore becomes the player's goal. The map is broken up into regions as in Risk, with the player able to move units to any region they have liberated and which isn't blocked by enemy troops. Units can also be moved into enemy-held regions bordering on friendly territory to attack anything stationed there and liberate new territory if successful.
Liberating and managing regions is where Highlands shines; region control is the core of the game's strategic decision-making and they've done a lot to make it deeper, in some ways, than Risk (which the developers admitted was an influence on the game in their Kickstarter pitch last year) without moving far away from the simplicity of abstraction that characterizes the classic board game. Most regions of the map generate one of either leadership points, food, or construction materials. Leadership points are used to buy new units, since friendly units are never periodically generated the way enemy units are. Food is consumed every turn as upkeep for units and can also be spent to heal units. Construction materials can be spent by some units to give a big boost to the fortifications of a region.
Resources don't instantly start flowing in as soon as a region is captured, however. One or more characters of the leader class must use a special ability to rally the folks who live in the region and get it to start producing resources. Doing so prevents them from defending the region because they're busy rallying the people. Enemy units will attack an empty or weakly defended region if they think they can get away with it, which means you can't afford to rally a region if the enemies in the neighboring regions are too strong compared to the forces you have stationed there. When this is combined with the fact that enemy regions do get reinforcements every so often, it makes for a game in which the player must choose to use tactics like aggressively attacking regions and then falling back to let them be recaptured by the enemy while rallying a region or taking a much longer time and fortifying regions against attack as they go at risk of being overrun by enemy armies in regions that have been strengthened by reinforcements a few too many times.
Combat, which takes place at the end of a turn if the player moves into enemy territory or vice versa, is Highlands' greatest weakness. It's astounding, given how well done the map control and resource management is handled, that actual battles are so underwhelming. Every battle is individually resolved at the end of the turn, but the only thing the player has any control over in combat is which character in the friendly army will take the brunt of all the damage the enemy is throwing at them. Damage dealt and received is determined completely at random and death is permanent, so if you accidentally get into a battle in which your forces outpower the enemy forces but their first hit can kill your hardiest character, your choices are lose the character (unless you get really lucky on the random damage roulette) or load from your last save (which you can't do from the combat screen). There's no way to for the player to know that this will happen before going into combat, either, even though the game is very good at making it clear if enemies will attack a weak region and what effect it will have.
As a result, the combat screen feels like a waste of time. I'd rather combat were resolved automatically, to be honest, though that would negate the RPG elements that Burrito Studios has added to the game. A certain number of units are carried forward from one battle to the next with all of their levels and EXP intact and can have their equipment changed in between stages. I think the developers want players to care for the units and characters, too, but while the writing isn't terrible, it also isn't great, and it definitely isn't strong enough to carry that idea in a game where the mechanics don't reinforce it. As it stands, losing a character just feels like losing a unit that's expensive to replace.
Another gripe I have with the game, which is perhaps partly a result of me being a grizzled veteran of strategy games, is the controls. The visual interface is fantastic, making it clear at every decision point what the immediate effects of the player's choice will be, but it feels like a port from a touchscreen game rather than a PC game. Options are minimal, you can't load save files during combat, and there's a decided lack of keyboard shortcuts. If you want to move units, you must click and drag them because clicking them and then clicking where you want them to go deselects them. If you want to move them a long distance, you must click and drag them to an intermediary region and then click and drag the map and then click and drag the units again. In combat, there's no key you can press to make combat happen; you have to move your mouse from the right hand side of the screen, where the end turn button was, to the left hand side of the screen, where the start combat button is. None of this is game breaking, and if they ever port the game to touchscreens it will be a great touchscreen interface, but no one is playing it on a touchscreen yet.
The bright colors and beautiful art might make the game attractive to casual players, but I would suggest that a beginning strategy player start elsewhere. Even the first few stages require thinking ahead and being careful about overextending.
Overall, Highlands in its current form is an interesting (and beautiful) strategy game in spite of its flaws, one that favors a balance of aggression and defense. I say in "its current form" because the developers have announced plans to introduce major changes to the combat system in June even though it isn't an early access title. How big a difference those changes make is yet to be seen. It's also worth noting that Burrito Studios hasn't yet released the game for Mac and Linux like they said they would in their Kickstarter campaign.
Highlands is currently available via Steam for Windows at the price of $15.
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