Expanding on the social structure and lives of the Kushan people before the exodus, DoK manages to feel both higher-and-lower stakes than the original game - the tone is dark, but it's gray as opposed to near-black.

Combat is pretty nicely translated from preceding games, with terrain on maps affecting visibility, range, etc, and generally it's pretty fun and sometimes challenging. Gaalsien units are visually and operationally a world away from Coalition units - and i think that's one of the aspects that works the best. Coalition crafts, LAVs and armor are turreted, wheeled vehicles resembling either modern construction equipment or scaled-up M113s, while the Gaalsien have an arsenal which wouldn't look out of place in the hands of the Separatists in Star Wars.

The atmosphere, setting, and terrain are my favorite parts. Despite mostly taking place on a desert, every single campaign map is visually distinct and memorable. Meanwhile, the Campaign is just as desperate as Homeworld - you and your fleet are several thousand kilometers away from your goal, and the desert is incomprehensibly lonely.

It's a good game

don't get me wrong, i don't oppose war games on a moral ground. i play arma 3, highfleet, and war thunder. but like, my main concern with this is that it feels uncanny compared to the rest of the game. you're "rescuing" simulated people, yes, but you're fighting a faceless military.

now, the devs could have done the sensible thing and just stuck a bunch of drones in there and all, but, like, they ended up making every vehicle you fight appear to be manned. is there not something poetic in the total de-personalization of it?

K:S occupied DDLC's position in the Online Cultural Zeitgeist before DDLC came out. Unlike DDLC, which it often is compared to as per having a reputation as Baby's First VN, K:S pretty much adopts the genre's tropes wholesale - despite the insistence of fans who just haven't played any other VNs.

If it has one Achilles heel, it's the fact that it's a collaborative project, and in addition to tonal dissonance, the fact remains that while i personally found certain routes Almost Too Much Like A Mirror, others left me wondering where the hell the 4th act went. Content-wise, you'd expect a 2012 western VN about disabilities to be far worse than it is - however, K:S manages to be more than halfway decent, even anodyne at times.

If one part actually aged horrifically, it'd be the fact that the Best Friend character's rants came across as mildly amusing in the distant past of 2012, but now in 2024 come across as the ramblings of a dude who's going to do a mass casualty event.

FF12 meets Dune by way of the Pacific Front, with a healthy dose of late-Tsarist aesthetic.

In a game mixing strategy and side-scrolling shoot-em-up, you lead the last remnants of the once-grand Romani Empire's airship fleet on a desperate battle to regain control of the troubled Republic of Gerat - meeting with local allies, dodging Gathering strike fleets, taking Cities, and eventually making your way to Khiva.

To make your way there successfully, you have to take charge of a motley group of ships, beginning with the remnants of the Romani fleet and expanding with every local leader you meet or mercenary you hire. You may be The Empire, but you're on the back-foot here - if you stay in one place too long, you'll be reported and destroyed, and the threat of strike fleets hovers over you like a ghost.

You have countermeasures, though - through a sort-of minigame, you can decode communications. If you choose to use aircraft, and you're good at it, you can carpet-bomb strike fleets before they know who they're facing - cruise missiles are an option, too. You can go into the open desert, and see if you find anything there. Mostly, though, you'll be behind enemy territory, outgunned, outnumbered, and with little support.

Giving away most details of the plot would be spoilery, but i did quite enjoy the experience of winning over a motley crew to your side - done through a slightly-opaque card minigame, but everyone you can recruit tends to be a bit more interesting. I would have liked more "Fluff" events to flesh them out a bit more - give you more of a reason to care about them rather than the game telling you that you gotta. The one thing that knocks half a star off is that, pending future updates, the ending feels a bit unsatisfying.

The UI is immersive to a fault, and is wonderfully appointed in the bakelite dials and CRT screens of a Soviet cruiser. The ship design interface is fun, but I'd like if, for example, your designed ships showed up naturally. Updates have made most of the more visually confusing features toggles, so that aspect of many early reviews has been looked into.

For all those reasons above, the unique aesthetic, and the general feeling of being up at 2am, down 3 cruisers, and high-tailing it to Khiva as 3 strike groups tail you, I think Highfleet is one of my favorite games.