Hinterland Released!

[walkstheplanes]

Hinterland (http://www.tiltedmill.com/hinterland/), by independent developers Tilted Mill, has been released on Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/app/17140/) for $20. Here are the details:

Loot, level and build with fast paced RPG combat and strategic base building!

Can you build a vibrant settlement, lead your people to prosperity, and tame the wild Hinterland?

Party-based RPG Action — A variety of characters, weapons, and strategies are at your disposal -- will you lead the charge with a devastating two-handed strike, or stand behind the herder in plate mail with your trusty bow?
Town Building — Choose your settlers from a huge cast of characters and arm them for defense, or give them tools for production.
Character Development — Develop lowly farmers into great warriors and customize your character with a variety of specializations.
Random fantasy world — Each game of Hinterland takes place in a new location with different resources, items, and challenges. Different challenges feature a range of enemies, including orc war camps, dark elf raiding parties, goblin infested mines, ruined cities filled with undead, and more.
Customizable Gameplay — From a hardcore game to a world without raiders you make the choice about the type of game you want to play.Check out the thread (http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65049)in the PC Games forum. If you're picking this up, write your impressions there (and if you're thinking of picking this up, read our impressions there).

[walkstheplanes]

Pretty accessible Req's.

System Requirements

Recommended:
o Supported OS: Windows® XP or Vista
o Processor: 1.8 GHz processor or higher
o System Memory: 512 MB RAM Windows XP® (1 GB for Windows® Vista)
o Video Card: 64 MB DirectX 8.1 compatible card
o Hard Disk: 350 MB uncompressed free hard drive space

[Katslover]

Damn, I'm on a trip right now and I tried to purchase Hinterland on my phone and it wants me to install Steam when I just wanted to buy the game and have it ready to download whe I get home tomorrow. Curses! Plus that is a horrible sentence.

[Nura]

Bought and downloading! can't wait for this :D

[TrackZero]

Really wish I could demo this before I buy. But I'm sure I'll get more out of the $20 than I did from Lost Winds....

[DerwanS]

You know... I still have a pile of games that need finishing sitting at home. This is NOT helping!

[Pokute]

Don't trust the stated low system requirements!

Starting up Hinterlands (in the main menu) takes hefty 800 megabytes of memory. 900 after having started the game. No medium length game, playing in the hometown became a nightmare on Geforce 9800equivalent when raiders struck with binary frame rates. That on low textures and 800*600. Luckily my lackeys killed the intruders.

RANT MODE TURN ON:

The game is a fun one in Diablo style, but take out different enviroments, everything of plot, bosses, most rpg elements and randomly generated dungeons (the terrain is sparsely randomized obstacles).

City building is interesting, at least for the first playthrough. Have the common sense (I didn't have) to hire a farmer, herder or a trapper first or else your citizens will leave immediately due to lack of food. Building and upgrading buildings requires loot, map resources and prerequisite buildings. There is a wide variety of building and associated professions for your citizens. The professions are divided in money, food, items and military. Item producers can be set to automatically sell their production for money.

I'm uncertain that the citizen level affects anything else than their fighting ability. Produced items may get some bonus stats according to levels though. I'm not even sure if citizen profession affects their stats or fighting ability.

Attacking is pretty straightforward - you click on a target monster and it's bashed to death. Running away works and is often adviseable - the penalty from dying is unusual but rather harsh. Raiding parties do one of the following - steal money, steal food or kill your citizens. Fighting in the city is a hazardous - you can lose citizens and buildings. While raiding parties are unable to destroy buildings, the danger is in misclicks during low-fps battles.

You can have up to 3 companions in your party and they can be very useful indeed. Unfortunately it's almost impossible that you'd party with the same team from start to finish - the members can die very quickly. My parties wiped a couple of times. Fortunately replacements are plentiful, they usually have higher levels too...

The citizens are quite useless for defending the city, especially if you haven't replaced the starting citizens with higher-leveled ones. After all, a level 7 farmer equipped with an rake won't hold off the raiders. When a raider alert comes, you usually must stop adventuring and rush back home to defend. Being able to build city walls to delay the raid and make the defense a little bit less chaotic would've been nice.

With the three stats - attack, defence and health, there aren't many exotic character setups. The equipment stats are attack, defence and speed (I did see an exception to verify this rule). These stats are used for spellcasting too - resulting in working healers with plate mails (+defence) and rings of sharpness (+attack which translates to healing power). And as far as I saw, you can't play as a healer. You can't play this game as a pure mayor nor as a pure adventurer. As the main character, you also get the choice of a trait on level up which often takes the form of extra stats, town bonuses or looting bonuses.

Fighting can be mixed up with potions that your citizens make, but that's too little to really liven it up. Most of the fights are either a slaughterfest of mobs or careful creeping to pull only one at a time. AI companions don't understand the idea of a pull very well.

Winning the game is extremely plain. After killing last mob (there are no bosses) you're presented with "you win"-text and score.

Lots of small things to complain about. Maybe with some better AI and pathfinding, real dungeons would be possible.

One play lasts about 3-5 hours. The game setup seems diverse enough that a replay or two is possible, but I don't see the replay becoming very eventful.

Verdict: 6/10 tweekaboos.

[snubber]

Thanks for the review Pokute.

[Westfield, Ma]

Having dl'ed this last night, I totally agree with Pokute. His review is rather spot on. I was hoping for a little more from this game and at this point 20$ is a little much to pay for this IMHO. I played it for about two hours so I'm hoping there's some stuff I missed.