Review of Hinterland: Orc Lords

This is one of the better "Gauntlet clones" that I've played recently. It combines simple action rpg elements with simple town building. It's meant to be played in 30 minutes or to over 4 hours, depending on play style and options used. I'm having a lot of fun with it.

I really like the graphics and art. The graphics remind me of Darkstone, the art reminds me a little bit of The Temple of Elemental Evil and even Icewind Dale. The music is standard fantasy, you've heard it all before in other games, but I like that kind of music, and this music is great. I won't be putting it on mute anytime soon!

Character customization is lacking. I enjoy customizing my character, but all that I get to choose here is a name, portrait, and class. There isn't that many portraits to choose from, just a few for each race, but there is a good variety of classes. There is also a good variety of models. Some are fatter than others, some have short hair and some have long hair, there are white people and black people. You just can't pick when creating your character(ex. a courtesan will always be skinny, a brawler will always be bigger. Can't make a skinny brawler. However, skin color is based on portrait used).

The city building part of the game is a lot of fun. From deciding which guys you want in your town, which buildings to upgrade, and where to place your buildings. Having to manage food, search the map for resources for the town, and defending the town against attackers. Some buildings even have more than one upgrade option. Starting out by yourself and building a town from nothing is part of the fun.

Combat is just the basic old style of action rpg. You raise your attack and defense as you fight, gain levels and raise stats and gain new skills, find new armor, weapons and items, left click the mouse to attack till the monsters fall down. Even though it's just like it was years ago, it's still fun here. They even made it easier for you, with auto equipping and using as few left clicks as possible. Having people in town auto-equip and the auto-sorting makes things so much easier. If I have someone in my town guarding it against attackers, I don't have to worry about making sure they equip newly made weapons and armor, they do it themselves, freeing me up to continue my adventure for loot and resources.

Something else that I like, is the ability to take your townspeople and have them fight with you. Take the priest out of his church and have him fight with you, healing you in battle. Or take the farmer from their field and slap some armor on them. You can have up to 3 npc's fight with you. I enjoy the challenge of creating an all female town. Because men and women will come to your town looking to build, I always have to kick the men out, waiting for more women to show up.

The interface is just perfect. Everything is made easy. Looting monsters and from chests takes a split second, selling is as easy as pressing shift and left clicking, there's auto-sorts and auto-equips, the menus are all easily accessed and any important information is just a single left click away. It truly makes an rpg and town building easy.

I would love a game like this with more depth. There are no dungeons to enter, you can only explore above ground. Entering dungeons, having more detailed quests, and having a more robust economy side would have made this game lots better. As a casual action rpg with town building in it, I don't see how it could get any better on the casual side.


A note about the DRM used. There isn't any. There's no cd key. The game cd doesn't need to be in the drive to play.



5 stars overall: The game plays smooth on my medium range computer. The game only crashed once in 10 hours of play. When I opened up the game after the crash, the game was saved right when it crashed. I don't have to worry about losing gameplay in case it crashes. That's a big plus!

5 stars for fun: After 10 hours I'm still enjoying playing it. It's so simple, yet so addictive.



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