Combat

Highwater's battles look like XCOM and behave like a chess problem. Every source of randomness that a tactics game normally uses to create drama has been removed.

The rules, as verified

Rule	Detail	Source
Board	Rectangular grid, isometric camera, hand-authored per encounter	Multiple reviews
Action economy	One move and one action per character per turn	Shacknews
Action points	None — no AP pool to budget	Games Asylum
To-hit	No hit-chance percentages. If a target is in range, the attack lands	Entertainium
Turn order	Player party acts, then enemy party retaliates	Hardcore iOS
Undo	Movement can be undone after acting	Games Asylum
Restart	Any battle can be restarted at will, no penalty	Games Asylum
Animation skip	Fast-forward exists but is never stated in the UI	Games Asylum
Win condition	Usually "all enemies down, at least one ally standing"; often an objective instead	Hardcore iOS, Shacknews
Length	~10–15 minutes per encounter	Games Asylum

Unverified quantitative layer

No HP totals, damage values, ranges or movement allowances have been read from game data — the game ships no accessible data files and no source release. The only hard number found in the wild is a community claim that robot dogs have 3 HP, used as a setup for Josephine's chain (Steam collectibles guide). Treat every specific value in this vault as unverified until someone unpacks the build. See Sources.

Determinism is the design

Removing the to-hit roll converts each board from a risk-management problem into a solvable one. The consequences run through the whole game:

Failure is informational, not punitive. You lose because you missed a line of play, not because a 78% shot whiffed. Restart-at-will and movement undo close the loop: the encounter is a puzzle you retry, not a run you protect.
No cover-percentage layer. Cover exists physically — objects block lines and can be destroyed — but not as a probability modifier, so its value is binary and readable at a glance (Environmental Interaction).
Enemy AI can be simple without feeling cheap. With no dice, the enemy turn is a predictable consequence of your positioning; players read AI mistakes as their solved line.
The difficulty ceiling is authored, not tuned. Because there is no build layer (Equipment & Boosters), a fight can only be made harder by adding board complexity — more enemies, more objectives, more moving parts.

Reviewers converge on the phrasing without prompting: "tightly designed logic puzzles" (Forbes), "more of an isometric puzzle than a true turn-based experience" (GamingTrend), "battles are often puzzle-like" (Impulse Gamer). The dev's own framing — "puzzle meets chess" — matches.

Objective variety

The kill-everything default is broken regularly, and this is where the encounter design earns its keep (Enemies & Encounter Design):

Fetch — retrieve an item from the battlefield
Reach — move characters to a location before a turn limit
Protect an object — the generator defence, with an achievement for finishing with all generators undamaged
Protect NPCs — the Alphaville riot, where losing a single civilian forfeits "Good Samaritan"
Escape — the sewer, where rats spawn endlessly and killing them is a trap
Avoid entirely — the museum battle can be skipped by answering film-trivia questions correctly
Three-way fights — Alphavillians vs Insurgents, Insurgents + robots vs a scavenger; and some allies are AI-controlled rather than yours to command

Where it thins out

The system has no depth reserve. There is no flanking bonus, no overwatch, no status economy beyond a handful of one-off effects (Nikos' camera flash skips an enemy turn), no cooldown management, no positioning payoff beyond range and ledges. Once a player has seen each character's two or three verbs, novelty has to come entirely from the board. Reviewers who played to the end report exactly that curve: "goes from cute to tediously drawn out" (Medium), while the same reviewers praise individual set-pieces.

What breaks if you remove it

Remove the determinism and Highwater becomes a small, shallow XCOM with 30 missions and no build system — strictly worse than its peers. The no-miss rule is the load-bearing decision that lets a two-verb combat system carry a 7-hour game.

Environmental Interaction · Party & Characters · Enemies & Encounter Design · Comparative Analysis