Bret Devereaux

In short, the game actually simulates a fog of war.And it's kind of brilliant. In most games, the 'fog of war' is just a binary: you can see perfectly where your units are and not at all where they aren't. Highfleet forces you to deal with variable and uncertain information.

Just about the only thing it doesn't do is feed you actively wrong information (though you can do this, for instance, by detaching a fast ship to intentionally get spotted going one way and break contact - the AI will rush after the ghost you just created, while you slip past).

So you are constantly forced to make decisions (do I have time to repair here? refuel? where should I go next?) based on incomplete, fragmentary or dated information.

The limitations of the campaign also make you think in terms of task forces with specific purposes and fuel economy, rather than just bashing around in one big blob as in most 'strategy' games.

One of my favorite games to emerge from the Russian indy scene! Only complaints I have is that, like a lot of Russian games, the difficulty curve is really poorly done and pretty hostile to learning. That and the story could have used a bit of internal quality control.

Yeah it is not at all beginner friendly and expects you to learn via a lot of trial and error. There are a lot of neat features that are completely undocumented, like how you can hide from radar by landing. And the difficulty curve is backwards - it gets easier, not harder.

In particular the game doesn't quite know what to do if the player carves out an area of the map and then intentionally lures and hunts the strike groups out of range of their supporting missiles and aircraft. Eventually they try to pull back to Khiva, but too late.