Highlander: The Game
Preview
Another Immortal arrives from the Highlands of Scotland.
by Marko Susimetsä
previewed on PC
Great villains and magic (cntd)
In his quest, MacLeod finds that he must sift through his own memories and thus enter into three key periods in his past: the 1st Century Pompeii, the 9th Century Highlands of Scotland and the 14th Century Feudal Japan. This, naturally, lets you play the hero in all these eras as you hunt for the three fragments of the stone. In addition, you will also be encountering other characters from the Highlander mythos, such as Methos who is reputed to be the oldest immortal of them all and who is also Owen's mentor. All in all, there will be 18 missions to play through until the climactic battle against your ancient enemy takes place in New York.
Get ready for the action
In Highlander: The Game you will get the opportunity to use various sorts of swords based on the ones used in each of the eras that the game explores. In the Pompeii setting, you will be wielding twin gladius, while in the Scotland you will naturally use the claymore and in Japan the ever-popular katana. Naturally, all these swords will also come with their own techniques and with more generic combat skills that you may use against your enemies.
In addition to his skills with swords, the secret of Owen's long survival against other Immortals seems to lie in his cat-like agility and, rather surprisingly and very unfittingly with the Highlander setting, a variety of magical abilities such as chi balance, fireblade, wind fury and stone armour. None of these abilities have ever been explored in other Highlander media, but apparently you must give some freedom of expression to game developers.
Furthermore, you will get to play around with the immortality when you disarm your enemies by, for example, impaling yourself into their blades, escape inconvenient locations by jumping off high cliffs and use your body as a conduit for electricity and fire. I cannot honestly say why these would be good ideas even if you were an immortal – what we know from the original movie, and especially the series, all of these actions would incapacitate your hero at least temporarily, allowing your enemies to hurt you pretty badly. But, we'll probably know more about these and other tricks by the time the game comes out.
“There can be only one!”
Most of the stuff that we've seen in the Highlander universe since the original movie has only made this adage more and more meaningful. It remains to be seen if the same holds true for the upcoming game. At least it seems to tweak the original concept once more into new directions, thus creating another new alternate universe for the Highlander fans to keep track of.
However, even if it challenges what we know of the Highlander universe, the game may still offer some fun action to the fans of the action genre. The graphics seem to serve that purpose well enough although we know very little of anything else at this point. Those who loved the original movie and the series because of the romance and tragedy may want to wait for some more information before they start drooling in expectation.
