HIGH FRONTIER in Review

This week at Gameshark.com I review Phil Eklund's HIGH FRONTIER and, sadly, TOM CLANCY'S GHOST RECON for Wii. It was the  best of times, it was the worst of times.

HIGH FRONTIER is an amazing game.  You've never played anything quite like it, and I'm inclined to call it Phil Eklund's best game to date. It's still squirrely due to all the scientific jargon and diagrams and it's outrageously idiosyncratic, but that is the designer's style. This game is much more of a "designer's game" than just about anything where the designer has synthesized some mechanics from other games, applied a theme to unify them, and called it a game. This is what game authorship really should mean, it becomes as much a thesis statement about its subject matter as it does a funtime activity.  It's confounding and dense but it's also completely brilliant. It's easy to say (and I do so in the review) that it's not for everybody, but if you're into games as a hobby, it shouldn't be that difficult to grasp. A game like RUNEWARS is actually much more complex.

As for GHOST RECON....Bill applied some editorial diplomacy. I rated it D---------------.  He just put D on the review. Either way, don't touch it, it's evil.