Highborn is a new fantasy strategy game for the iPhone. It's similar to the fantastic Uniwar, which anyone not averse to the word "strategy" should be playing. But Highborn is a lot more streamlined than Uniwar. For instance, you don't earn money to buy units. You don't spend mana to cast spells. Instead, your army and your magic powers are based almost entirely on controlling sites on the map. To cast spells, you have to control obelisks. To recruit a monk or a wizard, you have to capture a monastery or a magical tower, respectively.

Unfortunately, beyond some clever gameplay concepts, Highborn is a classic example of how not to make a game for the iPhone.

I'll explain after the jump.

1) Don't explain your game
Highborn has a lot of text where there should be numbers. This is partly because it's trying to be funny. Which it is sometimes. But it seems to have forgotten that it's a strategy game and not a comedy. I enjoy a good laugh as much as the next guy, but I also like knowing why my army can only walk so far, why my thief does one point of damage to a warrior, why a wizard is instantly slaughtered by archers, why casting an ice storm on a war machine is a waste of a perfectly good ice storm, and why I can barely scratch that knight's armor. This FAQ answers a few of the questions, but that stuff - and more! - needs to be in the game.

2) Offer a few limited ways to play
Highborn has no skirmish option. You only get eight canned campaign missions. I presume this is because the AI is so limited. At the bottom of the mission list is a big fat advertisement for more content, presumably to be sold separately at a later date. As a multiplayer game, you only get seven multiplayer maps with no set-up options. This is one of those games that's obviously a work in progress disguised as an ongoing project.

3) Make multiplayer games difficult to set up
You can only set up multiplayer games with your friends on Facebook. Now I play a lot of multiplayer games, but most of them aren't with people who are my Facebook friends. So I'll thank my games to stay out of my real-world social networking unless I want them there.

4) Don't let players communicate in multiplayer games
I've got four multiplayer games of Highborn going. At this point, I don't really have any interest in finishing them. I should be able to send my opponents apologetic messages explaining this to them. I suppose I'll just have to write on their Facebook walls instead.

5) Don't offer a convenient turn replay
Turn-based games need some option to replay the turn your opponent just played. Highborn does this, but it does it only once and it doesn't give you time to figure out the icons representing spells and support effects. And since a big part of the gameplay is units hiding in forest squares after you've watched them move there, you should be paying close attention and probably even taking notes. Highborn will not help you with this.

6) Shove your production values front and center, since you worked hard on them
Highborn breaks out a combat animation sequence for every battle you start. Which is kind of cute the first ten or twenty times. After that, given how slowly the game already runs, I have no interest in having to sit through these animations. The gameplay in Highborn is very nicely paced. The game itself isn't.

7) Test the player's devotion with long loading times and all-too-frequent lock-ups
I do appreciate that Highborn takes so long to load and that it's locked up on me several times. This makes it much easier for me to stop playing and wait until the next update.