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This title should appeal to real-time strategy fans who want to battle it out Braveheart-style.

If you haven’t heard of Highland Warriors yet, it’s a real-time strategy game set as early as 850 A.D. around the time of Scotland’s fight for independence – draw a parallel to the movie “Braveheart.”

From the press demo I’ve played, the game seems to be coming together rather well. It wasn’t long before the amount of options for all my military and civilian units reminded me of the scope of Empire Earth (without the civilization upgrades).

Overall, the game follows the fairly standard real-time strategy aspects, such as gathering food, farming, stone, mining ore, etc. You have peasants who perform those tasks, as well as build new structures, such as barracks, huts, mines, warehouses, and more.

Several aspects of the game stand out from the crowd though. It provides a great interface for seeing what your units are doing at a glance. You can open up a civilian menu that shows you which workers are farming, logging, etc. From there, you can click directly on a worker’s icon to select and focus the camera on that worker. This is an excellent way to facilitate the arduous task of resource management.

To further ease the management, units can be upgraded. For instance, a farmer can be an apprentice and then master his skill, becoming a more valuable asset to your society’s food production. Military units work in the same way. They can be upgraded with the click of a button from the barracks to make them fiercer combatants.

Military units can be grouped together to form a variety of formations, such as the wedge, square, circle, and a few others for tactical advantages. You’ll be able to have hand-to-hand warriors that use axes or swords, as well as scouts that rely on their trusty bow and arrows.

The developers are also going with a fully 3D approach to the game. You can zoom the camera in and out like Empire Earth, but you can also rotate it around for better angles of the action.

The engine looks pretty good so far with a lot of detail considering how many units can be onscreen at one time – they even have real-time shadows. The frame rate is not always perfectly smooth, but it never slows down to the point of not being able to play.

Thus far, I’m impressed with the game in its current state. There are some oddities here and there that make things more complicated, especially when dealing with groups. You can select a group of characters dragging a box around them only.

You can’t hold down Shift or CTRL to add units to an existing group. The limitations on the number of units that can be in a group also makes management of your warriors a little more tedious. But there is plenty of time to work out such minor kinks.

With its informative interface and easy-to-follow gameplay mechanic, Highland Warriors should appeal to real-time strategy fans out there who want to battle it out Braveheart-style.

Previewed by Brian Federici, PC Gameworld.