Highborn HD

Highborn HD is a game of contradictions.

Its fantasy artwork hides a surrealist comedic streak, while its gameplay is less about amassing large armies than about small squads battling for victory. It’s also a strategy game that packs large, exciting-looking maps, but discourages exploration.

For all its laughs and lengthy battles, Highborn HD misses an opportunity to offer bigger, more interesting encounters.

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For the most part you play as Archie, a knight who’s so heroic he can single-handily wipe out a whole army of mere mortals with a few swipes of his sword.

Accompanying Archie (as well as any of the other heroes offered) is a ragtag bunch of troops.

Unlike in other turn-based strategy games in which you draft your own units, your military outfit is pre-determined at the start of each map. Every level consists of a number of tiles, with terrain like forests offering up potential to hide troops in and slow down movement.

It's all fairly standard stuff, although Highborn HD exudes more character than its contemporaries thanks to genuinely funny dialogue and colourful graphics that pop on the larger iPad screen.

Each level is structured like a maze, with pockets of enemy troops and impassable terrain forcing you to funnel units past enemy encampments, occupied towns, and other structures en route to the level's boss.

There are also special structures that supply whichever side occupies them with a single unit. It's a clever way of preventing defensive 'turtling', in which you embed yourself ina corner of the map and let the enemy come to you.

Since you're unable to draft more units than exist on the map at the start of a mission, you can't play defensively - you have to be aggressive.

Unfortunately, the AI doesn’t seem to realise this, spending its time sitting in the same pre-determined positions until one of your units comes within range. There’s still some strategy required when engaging the enemy, but it’s more localised than each map initially suggests.

The problem is that while these sudden bursts of action are fun and engaging, the combination of the stand-your-ground AI and twisty, linear maps ends up feeling like a sequence of disconnect battles, rather than a grand game of strategic wit.

The battles themselves, played out as 3D animations, are great to look at, but imbalanced due to magic skills only being available to those on the attack. They’re also unskippable, which is a pain if you’re just carving through weak foes.

Moreover, accidentally move too close to an unwinnable fight and you can kiss your piece goodbye, as there’s no option to undo a move.

Developer Jet Set Games insists this is a intentional element of the game's design to prevent a workaround for fog of war, but there are other ways to allow moves to be reversed without destroying the cover provided by forests and fog of war.