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IGN Review of Hinterland: Orc Lords
Last year, developer Tilted Mill tried something different with Hinterland, a downloadable fantasy-themed hybrid game that combined light city building elements with a basic action-RPG component. Though the game had plenty of rough edges and technical issues, the approach worked pretty well and provided a good bit of fun for a budget title. Got Game Entertainment has recently released the game at retail under the title Hinterland: Orc Lords.
The new version comes with two new player characters, both Orcs, who run towns made up of Orcs rather than humans. Other than that, there are no practical changes between the original download version and the new retail package. With that in mind, we're running the original Hinterland review to introduce new players to the joys of this interesting hybrid game.
A game of Hinterland doesn't follow any kind of storyline or linear format. You set a number of parameters for your game map, such as length, difficulty, and starting character class, and dive in. The ultimate goal of each map is to wipe it clean of enemies, something you do through hack-and-slash gameplay and city building. Both components are closely linked, which serves as the game's primary strength as it gives you the feeling that regardless of what you're doing, you're making progress.
Cities are built by paying money to NPC visitors to settle, at which point a house is set up around your town center. Each NPC has a specialty that ranges from producing food, to buying back items, to raising skeletons. To get the more powerful NPCs to settle in your town or to upgrade those already settled, you need more money, fame, special items obtained from the combat field surrounding the town, and access to specific resources.
In this way, the game encourages you to go out into the wilderness and hack away at enemies surrounding resource nodes. Once all the foes in the vicinity are vanquished, you gain access to that particular resource. These nodes are oriented in a sort of concentric ring structure around your town with more difficult the enemies protecting those further out. While you'll have your own weapons, armor, and special items, you'll eventually need the help of your townsfolk to clear the map.
So the gameplay links back to your town. Not only are you picking NPCs for their specific professions, but you're looking for who might be useful in combat. The aspect you need to consider when determining who accompanies you into battle and who stays behind is anyone out fighting can't perform their job. So if you bring out a doctor NPC in the field, he'll no longer be researching new potions back in town or producing healing draughts.
For a game that initially seems fairly simple, you'll discover new layers of depth as you continue playing. Craftsmen NPCs can eventually specialize in armor or weapon production, guard posts can be upgraded to archery ranges if you've upgraded a craftsman to a fletchery, and necromancers will only settle if you've set up a temple of evil building. This kind of interplay keeps the simulation management aspects interesting yet doesn't let them get too complicated. You won't, for instance, have to assign villagers to clean orc droppings out of gutters, place roads in town, or manage satisfaction ratings of the community. Everyone pretty much keeps to themselves as they do their assigned work, giving you the freedom to head out and battle against the game's many enemy types.
Up to three party members can join you on your journey, and all NPCs, like you, can level up in by participating in combat. In that sense, you want to get your select few, like a couple of melee brawlers and a spellcaster, out in the field early to maximize the amount of experience gained. While companions level automatically as they fight, your main character is able to pick from a limited range of ability power-ups with each level like increased health, production bonuses, and attack and defense boosts. It's not an incredibly detailed system and doesn't particularly give way to many interesting skills, so anyone looking for a system with Diablo-like skill trees isn't going to find it here. The focus is on offering options for customization, but never really going that in-depth.
The same could be said for the way villagers are upgraded and function. You can tell an armorer to produce items, but you can't tell them specifically to make shields, or helmets, or chainmail. Instead, they produce items randomly. Again, it's a mechanic that frees you from the shackles of micromanagement, putting the focus on automation, but in cases where you really need some shields for your adventuring party it would have been helpful to be able to give more specific production instructions.
Beyond the combat and town building, Tilted Mill built in a fame meter that affects most aspects of a game's progression. NPC visitors require you meet a certain level of fame before they're willing to settle and if your fame dives into the negatives, you're given a countdown by a king figure that ticks away toward a game over. Boosting your fame is accomplished through success in combat as well as fulfilling requests from the king. When you die, any of your companions die, or if you screw up a king's request, you lose fame, and in some cases this can be frustrating as your companion AI doesn't always behave the way you expect. Friendly NPCs will occasionally attack targets you don't intend, and early on in the game this can have a significant impact as you won't have the resources to recover.
Those problems are all possible to wade through, however, so they don't ruin the overall experience. And the more you play, the more interconnections between the town building and combat you uncover. These come in the form of special drops from foes that work to augment your townsfolks' abilities or even give you access to dragons. A wide range of starting classes and number of tweaks for each map, like turning enemy raiders and the king's requests on or off, help keep things interesting when you restart a game.
One thing that definitely won't impress you are the graphics, which are about as generic as medieval fantasy graphics get. The animations in particular are stiff and generally uninteresting to watch. While you'll find a range of enemy models from giant ogres to tiny spiders skittering around the low level resources, the game never presents itself with any kind of original style or flair. The game's music is certainly serviceable, a tune that drifts between rousing and entirely forgettable, and the rough, jagged sound effects aren't going to win any awards.
But hey, it's a $20 USD game, right?
You should also know the game isn't free from technical issues. We experienced a few seemingly random crashes to desktop while playing through. When we went to reload, the game would continually crash within a few seconds, meaning we had to start over. Tilted Mill seems to be releasing new content for the game, though, so these kinds of problems may very well wind up getting fixed.
©2009-05-29, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The new version comes with two new player characters, both Orcs, who run towns made up of Orcs rather than humans. Other than that, there are no practical changes between the original download version and the new retail package. With that in mind, we're running the original Hinterland review to introduce new players to the joys of this interesting hybrid game.
A game of Hinterland doesn't follow any kind of storyline or linear format. You set a number of parameters for your game map, such as length, difficulty, and starting character class, and dive in. The ultimate goal of each map is to wipe it clean of enemies, something you do through hack-and-slash gameplay and city building. Both components are closely linked, which serves as the game's primary strength as it gives you the feeling that regardless of what you're doing, you're making progress.
Cities are built by paying money to NPC visitors to settle, at which point a house is set up around your town center. Each NPC has a specialty that ranges from producing food, to buying back items, to raising skeletons. To get the more powerful NPCs to settle in your town or to upgrade those already settled, you need more money, fame, special items obtained from the combat field surrounding the town, and access to specific resources.
In this way, the game encourages you to go out into the wilderness and hack away at enemies surrounding resource nodes. Once all the foes in the vicinity are vanquished, you gain access to that particular resource. These nodes are oriented in a sort of concentric ring structure around your town with more difficult the enemies protecting those further out. While you'll have your own weapons, armor, and special items, you'll eventually need the help of your townsfolk to clear the map.
So the gameplay links back to your town. Not only are you picking NPCs for their specific professions, but you're looking for who might be useful in combat. The aspect you need to consider when determining who accompanies you into battle and who stays behind is anyone out fighting can't perform their job. So if you bring out a doctor NPC in the field, he'll no longer be researching new potions back in town or producing healing draughts.
For a game that initially seems fairly simple, you'll discover new layers of depth as you continue playing. Craftsmen NPCs can eventually specialize in armor or weapon production, guard posts can be upgraded to archery ranges if you've upgraded a craftsman to a fletchery, and necromancers will only settle if you've set up a temple of evil building. This kind of interplay keeps the simulation management aspects interesting yet doesn't let them get too complicated. You won't, for instance, have to assign villagers to clean orc droppings out of gutters, place roads in town, or manage satisfaction ratings of the community. Everyone pretty much keeps to themselves as they do their assigned work, giving you the freedom to head out and battle against the game's many enemy types.
Up to three party members can join you on your journey, and all NPCs, like you, can level up in by participating in combat. In that sense, you want to get your select few, like a couple of melee brawlers and a spellcaster, out in the field early to maximize the amount of experience gained. While companions level automatically as they fight, your main character is able to pick from a limited range of ability power-ups with each level like increased health, production bonuses, and attack and defense boosts. It's not an incredibly detailed system and doesn't particularly give way to many interesting skills, so anyone looking for a system with Diablo-like skill trees isn't going to find it here. The focus is on offering options for customization, but never really going that in-depth.
The same could be said for the way villagers are upgraded and function. You can tell an armorer to produce items, but you can't tell them specifically to make shields, or helmets, or chainmail. Instead, they produce items randomly. Again, it's a mechanic that frees you from the shackles of micromanagement, putting the focus on automation, but in cases where you really need some shields for your adventuring party it would have been helpful to be able to give more specific production instructions.
Beyond the combat and town building, Tilted Mill built in a fame meter that affects most aspects of a game's progression. NPC visitors require you meet a certain level of fame before they're willing to settle and if your fame dives into the negatives, you're given a countdown by a king figure that ticks away toward a game over. Boosting your fame is accomplished through success in combat as well as fulfilling requests from the king. When you die, any of your companions die, or if you screw up a king's request, you lose fame, and in some cases this can be frustrating as your companion AI doesn't always behave the way you expect. Friendly NPCs will occasionally attack targets you don't intend, and early on in the game this can have a significant impact as you won't have the resources to recover.
Those problems are all possible to wade through, however, so they don't ruin the overall experience. And the more you play, the more interconnections between the town building and combat you uncover. These come in the form of special drops from foes that work to augment your townsfolks' abilities or even give you access to dragons. A wide range of starting classes and number of tweaks for each map, like turning enemy raiders and the king's requests on or off, help keep things interesting when you restart a game.
One thing that definitely won't impress you are the graphics, which are about as generic as medieval fantasy graphics get. The animations in particular are stiff and generally uninteresting to watch. While you'll find a range of enemy models from giant ogres to tiny spiders skittering around the low level resources, the game never presents itself with any kind of original style or flair. The game's music is certainly serviceable, a tune that drifts between rousing and entirely forgettable, and the rough, jagged sound effects aren't going to win any awards.
But hey, it's a $20 USD game, right?
You should also know the game isn't free from technical issues. We experienced a few seemingly random crashes to desktop while playing through. When we went to reload, the game would continually crash within a few seconds, meaning we had to start over. Tilted Mill seems to be releasing new content for the game, though, so these kinds of problems may very well wind up getting fixed.
©2009-05-29, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved