Highland Warriors (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.5 stars OK
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 5.9 (2.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Craig Beers
• Reviewed on: 01/29/2003
• Released on: 01/20/2003
• Originally published on GameSpot: Highland Warriors (PC) Review

You may remember Data Becker's previous game, America. It was a 2D real-time strategy game styled after the Age of Empires series, and it was, not surprisingly, set in America. Data Becker's newest game, Highland Warriors, takes place in a different era on a different continent. The game does a good job of portraying the units and landscapes that you'd expect to see in a game that takes place in medieval Scotland, but unfortunately, Highland Warriors' historical accuracy doesn't compensate for the deficiencies in its gameplay and graphics.

In Highland Warriors, you play as various factions that guided the history of the nation through several centuries. You unite the country's clans under a single king, play as the English in their conquest of Scotland, rebel against the English as William Wallace, and finally reunite the clans and claim independence with Robert the Bruce. Highland Warriors offers plenty of single-player gameplay to keep you occupied for some time. The game has four campaigns that consist of 10 missions each, and it has a skirmish mode against the computer AI. Highland Warriors also has a multiplayer mode that lets you take your highlanders online against a human opponent.

It's too bad, then, that the core gameplay doesn't quite hold up. Highland Warriors' gameplay resembles the same sort of formula you've probably seen in other real-time strategy games: gather resources, build a base, build an army, and attack. Peasants construct buildings and gather the game's five resources: wood, food, stone, iron ore, and gold. The game takes an interesting approach to resource gathering. Workers gain experience points as they gather a certain type of resource, and after a while, they can obtain a master-craftsman award that lets them gather that specific resource more quickly, at the expense of being more inefficient at gathering other kinds of resources. It's not a new concept, but it's rarely been implemented well in a real-time strategy game. Highland Warriors seems to take a step in the right direction in this regard, but the system ends up seeming like a gimmick. Workers achieve mastery very quickly, so creating specialized workers isn't really a challenge or much of an achievement.

Highland Warriors has variable weather--seasons change in the game every 20 minutes or so, and the change in weather affects the way you collect the food resource. You can't cultivate fields in winter, so you must have either enough stored food or alternative food sources. It's another interesting idea, but this, too, ends up being more of an annoying gimmick than anything else. While many strategy games have moved away from micromanagement of individual units and instead use intelligent peon units to help players gather resources and build bases, Highland Warriors' approach to resources sticks out like a sore thumb. You can have fields automatically replant themselves, but if you don't have enough wood (which happens frequently, since fields are quite expensive), the option becomes unchecked, and you'll have to manually reenable it. Otherwise, your peasants just sit idle in the barren field without finding something to do on their own. Then again, you often don't even need to bother with this complex system, since you can pick berries, hunt animals, and "build" cattle for a very cheap price in gold. Just sticking to cattle is usually sufficient for single-player games, because you'll rarely find yourself running out of gold before you finish a mission.

In fact, the game doesn't even begin to get challenging until you get fairly fair into the campaigns. Most real-time strategy fans should be able to breeze through the first campaign without having to restart a single mission. Certain missions will start you out with an initial force of troops, and in some cases, you can just take these soldiers and rush your enemy's base, finishing the mission in just a few minutes. At least the campaigns don't get too monotonous, because each side has different units. There are infantry, cavalry, ranged, and siege units in the game, and some of the game's playable factions even have magic-using units, such as druids, mages, and rangers. Unfortunately, Highland Warriors doesn't let you know how well a unit performs--when you select a unit, you will get no indication of its strengths or combat abilities. You can only make an educated guess based on the cost. You can upgrade each unit type, but similarly, the game doesn't tell you how much the unit will improve.

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