Rating: 4 out of 5
Pros: Fun, complex, Dwarf Fortress-like gameplay, with decent (if simple) graphics
Cons: A few bugs, user interface, incomplete features (it's an ALPHA version afterall)
Note that this review is on an ALPHA version of Gnomoria
(specifically version 0.8.24); this version is not the final retail
version that will eventually be available. It may be some time before the final version is
released, and this review should help you decide whether or not the game
is something you might be interested in and whether or not to pre-order
it for the pre-release discount price.
So far the gameplay in
Gnomoria pretty much screams "I'm a graphical Dwarf Fortress clone",
and that's not a bad thing. I've always loved Dwarf Fortress, but the
ASCII graphics leave much to be desired and likely turn a lot of people
away before they even try it. I can best describe Gnomoria as a
strategic simulation game, where you control a group of gnomes as they
try to make a life for themselves in the wilderness.
The world
is randomly generated based on a seed, and there are a number of
options you can play with that effect things like the depth of ores you
can mine, the size and flatness of the world, enemy strength, etc. It
takes a minute to generate, so I usually start the game and go grab a
drink or have a cigarette while waiting. It only takes a minute the
first time for the initial generation though, and any subsequent times
you play on the same map load quickly.
While the graphics are a
vast improvement over the ASCII text in Dwarf Fortress, they are still
pretty simple. They are fairly small, isometric sprites and there's not
much in the way of animation, but they are kind of cute and the style is
neat. There's a good amount of variety to the world, with different
types of trees and plants, rocks and minerals, as well as randomly
generated caves and water sources throughout the map. You can build up
and/or dig down, but one of the most important things to do is section
yourself off from the main world to afford yourself some sort of
protection against enemies. A game year is divided into four seasons of
12 days each, and during the first season you don't get any real enemies
so that you have some time to prepare. You'll still have the occasional
wild animal like a bear or a honey badger, and these can do some damage
to your fresh little gnomes, but the main enemies aren't around just
yet.
You can mine, dig, forage or deconstruct just about
everything in the game, and this leaves you with materials you can use
to build new things. A lot of people start the game by digging into the
side of a hill and forming their main "base" or whatever in the tunnels,
and that's a good strategy. I, however, prefer to choose a flat area of
the map to start with (or flatten a hill if necessary) and build dirt
walls around a big starting area and go from there; I just really like
having the extra light during the day time.
You start out with
9 gnomes, and while you can't directly control these little guys, you
can assign tasks that you wish to be done and they will work through
them. You can, for example, designate an area of trees to be felled and
any woodcutting gnomes will start chopping them down. You can designate a
tunnel to be dug, and any miners will work at digging it out. You can
farm, plant groves of trees, raise Yaks/Emus/Alpacas, and any number of
various things that keep the game interesting. You may have 2
woodcutters and have them designated to cut down a pile of trees, craft
the logs into planks, carve some wooden trinkets, make some beds and
some doors, and have them so overwhelemed that certain things you
really need to get finished aren't getting worked on fast enough. Thankfully though there is a priority
system for most things that you can raise and lower at will, and this
helps a great deal when it comes to making your gnomes do what you want
them to do in relatively the right order.
Gnomes have needs
like The Sims; they get hungry, thirsty and tired. You can get food from
butchering animals, farming wheat for bread, picking wild apples and
strawberries, and even making sandwiches from bread and sausage. Drinks
are similar -- Yaks produce milk, a well can get water, wheat can be
turned into beer, berries can be turned into wine, etc. Usually the
easier to acquire food and drinks don't satisfy the gnomes for as long
as the ones that take longer, so there's good reason to work your way
towards making better things. A gnome will drop what he's doing and go
grab food if he's hungry or drink if he's thirsty, so having items that
keep them happy longer means they'll spend more time working.
Gnomes have a variety of skills, from mining to carpentry, horticulture
to hauling, woodcutting to caretaking. The gnomes you start out with all
have pretty good skills in certain areas and are assigned to those
tasks by default, which ensures you have a couple of good woodcutters,
miners and farmers, a builder and a rancher. You also start out with
three Yaks and a few containers containing some initial food and drink, a
few tools, a sword and a couple pieces of armor.
Most of the
buildings you can build are 9 square blocks and are called "workshops".
These take various quantities of wood, stone and/or metal to construct
and allow you to build new items when completed. A carpenter allows you
to make things like chairs, tables, doors, beds and crates. A blacksmith
allows you to make tools, a furnace allows you to turn wooden logs into
coal, etc. Kitchens allow you to butcher corpses (animals as well as
enemies like goblins -- anyone for an ogre sausage?) while the
distillery allows you to make wine and beer. You can even make complex
mechanics using windmills, steam engines, pressure plates, axles, gears
and switches. Enemy traps made of hatches or mechanical doors are always
fun!
The combat system is probably my favorite part of the
game, as it's surprisingly in-depth! If a gnome gets his leg chopped
off, he moves slower. His arm gets chopped off? He drops his weapon
because he can no longer hold onto it. Armor can be broken off of the
body, eyes can be gouged out so that you can't see anymore, bleeding to
death is not uncommon. A few times I've seen a gnome stab an enemy in
the chest, penetrating it's lungs, and causing it to actually suffocate
and die right there. Crazy.
Like I mentioned before, the
graphics are pretty simple but neat. You have many, many layers of depth
so you can mine way down into the ground, and you can similarly build
up quite a ways. Occasionally you'll get annoyed because you're working 3
layers above ground, but you'll be trying to build something at ground
level and not realize you're still on layer 3 though. It takes some
getting used to for sure, but it's not too bad. Things are fairly well
detailed though. For example, your gnomes all look completely different
from one another. They have various haircuts, beards, etc... sometimes
they'll even have a top hat or a monocle. You can see what they have
equipped and in their hands as well; a gnome with copper armor and a
mining pick can be easily distinguished on the map and not confused for a
gnome wearing bronze armor and wielding an iron claymore. Sound effects
are mostly non-existent, but the background music is pretty good
despite lacking much variety. It's fairly mellow and non-intrusive, but
it's a definite improvement to the game rather than a detriment. I
especially like the foreboding music that plays when an enemy appears on
the map.
The interface could use a little improvement as
well, but at least you're give two options to do things. First, there's a
popup menu full of submenus full of submenus when you right click on
the screen. This is a typical cascading menu like the Windows Start Menu
and is fairly easy to use. Secondly there's a hotbar at the bottom of
the screen, and clicking a button pops up a sub-hotbar, etc. This is
also fairly easy to use, but seems a little less intuitive somehow. Both
menus feature the same problem though -- they just don't seem to be
sorted well. Things seem to be in weird places and really take some
getting used to, but even then I still occasionally get confused looking
for something. For example, building a dirt wall is in a different
section of the menu than removing a dirt wall. Removing dirt stairs is
different than removing a dirt wall. Kind of quirky, but remember this
is an alpha version so it will probably get cleaned up and polished long
before the final version is released.
Another thing to note
is that while the world is built of layers, there are actually "wall"
pieces with thin "floor" pieces on top of them in each layer. I'll often
get confused as to why my gnome is stuck somewhere, only to realize
that he removed the floor tiles and trapped himself. There are still
wall tiles all around on the layer under him, but the floor tiles are
gone from the top so he can't walk across them. Easily remedied by
building new floor tiles, but it happens quite often. The artificial
intelligence of the gnomes also has a lot to do with this, as
designating a big chunk of floor for them to remove will often result in
them trapping themselves instead of removing it in a logical manner
that would allow them to leave afterward.
Everything in the
game has a base value, and totaling it up gives you your "Kingdom
Worth". At the beginning of every season you get "Gnomads" who migrate
to your kingdom and increase your gnome population, and how many of
these Gnomads you get directly relates to your kingdom worth. More and
stronger enemies also appear as your kingdom worth goes up, so it keeps
the challenge going for a while. The end game isn't fleshed out too well
yet though, as you get to a point after a number of years where your
soldiers can pretty much annihilate anything that comes your way and the
challenge goes away. It's still fun at this point, but I usually just
start a new game instead.
There is so much more I could say
about this game, but your best bet is just to try it for yourself. You
can download a free demo of the game from Gnomoria.com and play for 6
game days. It's about 100MB in size, so it's a quick download for anyone
short of dial-up users. If you decide to purchase the game after, you
can continue playing right where you left off, which I think is always a
good feature. All the programming and design for Gnomoria is
surprisingly done by one single guy, and he's pretty active on the
official forums (username: RoboB0b) answering questions and talking
about his plans for the future of the game. He also manages to get
substantial patches out to the game regularly, the frequency of which
amazes me a little.
If you like Dwarf Fortress, Towns,
Minecraft, or simulation games in general then you should definitely
give Gnomoria a try. System requirements are pretty modest, needing
Windows Xp/Vista/7, a 2GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, 50MB of hard drive
space, 128MB of video memory and DirectX 9.0c or higher.