Highland Warriors

My spreadsheet brain wants to love this one. Four playable factions, five distinct resources, a master-craftsman specialisation system, unit experience and level-ups, druid and mage support units, even a "Blood Frenzy" mode that auto-engages your soldiers on the nearest enemy. On paper, Highland Warriors looks like a feature-complete Age-of-Empires challenger set against the backdrop of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. In practice, most of those systems are half-baked, interesting columns in a spreadsheet that never quite connect into meaningful decisions. The resource loop is the clearest example. Peasants can specialise into master craftsmen for faster wood, stone, iron, gold, or food gathering, which sounds like the seed of a real economy game. But specialisation unlocks so quickly and the missions are so short that you never have time to build around it. Winter shuts down farming and forces you to pivot to cattle or berries, which is a genuinely smart touch, until you realise that spamming cattle is almost always the dominant food strategy regardless of season. The "Blood Frenzy" mechanic, where soldiers break formation and swarm the nearest target autonomously, strips you of unit control at the exact moment battles get interesting. It is a design choice that seems to undercut the tactical layer it was supposedly supporting. Critical reception landed at 58 on Metacritic for good reason: the AI offers little resistance once you assemble a decent-sized army, and reviewers at the time noted that a stack of axemen, claymore infantry, heavy cavalry, and a couple of druids could bulldoze most defences without reinforcement. The four campaigns cover the MacKay clan, the Picts, Scotland, and the English occupiers, each with separate mission chains totalling over 30 scenarios, which is generous for a game at this price tier. The skirmish mode against the CPU and the built-in map editor add some shelf life. Multiplayer technically exists but requires GameSpy-era infrastructure that no longer functions, so treat this as a singleplayer-only purchase in practice. Here is the honest targeting advice: total newcomers to RTS games who want a low-pressure, historically flavored campaign will get decent value here. The 360-degree camera, clear faction identities, and the Braveheart-adjacent atmosphere are real. Veterans who lived through Age of Empires II, Warcraft III, or any Relic RTS will feel the gaps acutely. There is no mod ecosystem, no modern community patching the bugs, and the peak concurrent player count on Steam hovers around two. Unit tooltips are essentially absent, you judge units by their gold cost and guess the rest, which is charming for about five minutes and frustrating for the next twenty. If the Scottish Wars of Independence theme genuinely excites you and your bar is "does it run and does it have content," the answer to both is yes. Otherwise, the superior titles this game was trying to compete with are all available cheaply too, and they have aged far better.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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