Highwater Hack 1.03 + Redeem Codes

The game was quick to play through and had a short list of characters. The art style was cool, and the battle system was fun. This isn’t a complaint, but the battles were easy, and through the whole game I only used one booster. If you can strategize well, you’ll win every battle with relative ease (Josephine is way OP if you use her correctly). I enjoyed playing this game, but definitely feel like there could have been a lot more to it…like it should be a bigger game but was condensed greatly.

Overall I was enjoying this game but there are some major game design flaws. For one if you accidentally beach yourself on an island that you can’t interact with there is zero way to fix it besides refreshing the game. The biggest flaw I’ve found is if you happen to take away weapons or boosters from your players there is no way to give them weapons while in mid fight which means that if they have zero weapons and aren’t a character that can punch then the character becomes completely useless in a fight and there is no way to fix it!!! I am pretty much stuck on the fighting sequence with the Vikings because one of my characters has zero weapons so he’s just useless and there is no going back because it is the start of a chapter so the only way for me to fix this would be to completely start over from the chapter before and it’s such a long chapter that I really don’t want to do that and honestly I shouldn’t have to!! I love story heavy games but if you make it frustrating and slow to play because of bad game design the story isn’t going to keep me going! I honestly hope there is a way for this to be fixed because then I might come back to the game but it seriously needs some work on the game design aspects. It feels like the game was made without any sort of play testing and making sure certain actions wouldn’t break the game.

I had a great few hours playing through Highwater. The graphics are good, the sound design is probably the best I’ve seen, and the combat and exploration are fun and streamlined. I found the difficulty level to be well balanced: easy enough for newcomers to the genre, just hard enough for XCOM veterans to be challenged if they want to do a perfect run, and no penalties either way. Suggestion to devs: the very beginning is a bit off-putting, I almost gave it up within the first five minutes and I would have missed out on a great game! In particular: the first long stretch of driving is boring, maybe start with an action sequence. Also, the white compass dots not disappearing after clearing up an area makes it seem like something was missed. Finally, on the fighting: Nikos is deadweight after the early game, maybe make him more of a true support. And Josephine’s blood lust is super fun to play, but maybe have more obstacles so she can’t too easily eviscerate 5 enemies in one turn.

Gladly the bugs that many other reviews have expressed seem to be worked out: I couldn’t get beached, the compass-like door was helpful, and I didn’t notice any bugs myself. The boating seemed accurate and I had to drive differently than a car as a result - that was mostly fun but there were too many straight drives with nothing to see and no plot development. The next thing to do was always clear and so were “hidden things” so I wasn’t endlessly searching the waterways.
Sadly the moral drift (pun intended) had apparently affected this post-apocalyptic earth in every way and the radio itself was at times explicit. Some of this is understandable and necessary for the game, but not all of it.
It was also a bummer to have items be stuck equipped to party members that left the party. I would change that.

This game was so much fun. The story is fantastic! And the music? Wow. I really want some of those songs so I can relisten.

The ending literally left me with goosebumps. For a mobile game? This is next level.

Highly recommend!!!! And here’s to hoping for some sort of sequel!

For the devs:

There were a few bugs I encountered:
1) the green zones that extract your characters once you reach them? They didn’t extract my characters. Made some battles challenging.
2) Any booster dealing with increased health did not increase the health.
3) The generator battle, the enemy bugs out and it gets stuck on the enemy’s turn.

A couple things I would love to see is:
1) a way to view each person’s attack descriptions while not in battle.
2) a way to change/apply boosters in battle. I’d right before (like with a warning or continue/confirm question type screen)

Cool game! It was pretty enjoyable, although that music that plays on the radio really had me cringing.

no more crashes or issues with saving progress! Finally got to play and it is a great story with fun mechanics

Why does every “adventure” game have to have violence? Seriously, someone please come up with an adventure game that does not have violence and I will tell everyone about it.

Also the navigation of the boat was not very user friendly.

Everywhere I go, it says turn around. Turn around and go where exactly? The little thing in the bottom right that I guess is supposed to give you direction is useless.

It’s a pretty good game but there’s always room for improvement.