Highwater is a strategy RPG originally released on mobile that takes place in a world on the brink of collapse. The planet is mostly flooded and the remaining survivors move through boats and live on small islands or high skyscrapers. All except the rich people from Alphaville, a post-apocalyptic society that is building a rocket to abandon Earth and reach Mars, humanity’s last hope.

Lost at Sea in Highwater

You play as a young boy, Nikos, who along with his three friends will try to sneak into Alphaville and get on the rocket. Throughout your post-apocalyptic cruise you will meet other survivors, some friendly but many other hostiles.

The story is actually that simple, maybe too much, and it’s a pity that despite being set in a fascinating and colorful water world, there isn’t anything interesting to do, except for talking to few characters or finding some gear and collectibles.

The locations feel very repetitive and there isn’t any incentive to explore, so you mostly follow a yellow mark looking for the next battle. If you were looking for a cozy story-driven game, you might get disappointed.

Advanced Tactics

In Highwater, you will spend a lot of time fighting hostile survivors. Each turn-based battle plays more like a puzzle on a grid. You give commands to your party members like in a chess game, but each character has their own weapons and special abilities.

Positioning and using the environment at your advantage is very important during battles, but overall, I can say that the difficulty is generally low and the only time you struggle to win is when you are clearly outnumbered.

Due to its mobile nature, Highwater is not really an engaging game to stream, unless your channel is mainly focused on mobile games. There isn’t enough story to keep the audience engaged and battles are generally too easy to get exciting.

The story tells an important message of climate change, so it might be still interesting to stream at least once if social themes are important for you and your audience. Replayability is also very low, considering that once finished the story the only thing you can do is trying to find any missed collectible.

Performance on PC is very good, which is easily understandable considering the game was originally released for mobile platforms. I didn’t encounter many bugs, the only ones were a few glitches between characters and environments, but nothing serious fortunately.

Highwater

PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch (2024)

Performance

Streamability

Audience Engagement

Replayability

Summary

Highwater communicates a very important social message, but fails to deliver an interesting story. Might be worth trying for the colorful world and the simple, but fun, turn-based combat.

2.3