Games: Hinterland

So I picked up this cute little game on Impulse mainly because I was bored and it was incredibly cheap.



Hinterland is a little indie game that is a cross between a City building sim (like Rome) and a RPG Hack and Slash (like Diablo). Sure it is a scaled down version of each, but that is the general gist.



You play a lord of a tiny town stuck in the corner of a map made up of 'zones' filled with baddies. Most of the 'zones' offer some sort of resource to help out your town.



Visitors also wander into your town from time to time and you can recruit them by building them a house. They each have a profession and provide something to the town such as Farmers making food, Merchants allowing you to sell excess loot and various craftsmen make new weapons, armour and such for you.



Meanwhile you need to go out adventuring to liberate new territory and make some much needed cash to buy new cronies.



Adventuring is the general click to kill style and is quite frankly to simplistic to be much fun on its own. You can take villagers along with you to assist in the killing, but there isn't really any tactical controls and they die far to easily to be much help.

Their isn't a whole lot involved with building your town either. There is more than enough space to build everything and have a bunch of space left over for extra guards and farms and such. The only time you really need to pay any attention to the town is when it gets raided as the friendly townsfolk seem incapable of defending themselves.

A game of Hinterland will take you 3 or 4 hours to play through and the maps are randomly generated so theoretically you could play a brand new game every time you sit down.

Unfortunately there just isn't enough variety in the game play. It's like chocolate muffins. You can have the muffins in all different shapes, but their still just chocolate muffins and sooner or later you are going to get sick of them and wont a banana muffin.

The graphics aren't too bad for the genre (being cheap ugly indie games) but the zoom is a bit too much and makes it really hard to work out where you are. The wide screen support is horrible and their is something seriously wrong with the sound engine and it tries to do positional sounds but seems unable to grasp the simple concept of front speaker = front sounds.

Given i only had to fork out $9.99 for this little gem I can't say I am unhappy or that I got less than I expected. If your bored, have a spare tenner and a few hours to burn this is certainly worth a look.

Cheers

G.