Hinterland Review

I have a problem with game companies that try to combine successful elements of multiple titles into one “slam dunk!” game. I imagine a bunch of corporate fat cats sitting around the table to conclude, “People like worldbuilding and people like hack ‘n slash games, let’s combine the two! Slam dunk!”

Not so for independent game developers. If they tell me they’re combining elements from multiple genres, I get excited about the possibilities, as I know they are (or should be) doing this because they love the idea and it’s what they want to create. Perhaps that’s unfair, and it certainly isn’t always correct. Sometimes independent games remind me that no amount of love and care put into a product can overcome certain conceptual problems, and, for a good chunk of it, Hinterland is one of those games.

The Gameplay

Hinterland combines elements typically found in action RPGs with a town-building process. In short gaming sessions, the character of your choice is thrown into the wilderness by order of the king and must tame the wild lands (read: kill all the monsters). You are given many options to customize your game to start, including difficulty and length, but also including randomization of resources (so you won’t be able to recruit every supporting NPC every time) and whether or not to include enemy raids on your town or requests from the king for which you can gain fame (usually he just asks for money or food, but sometimes he’s looking for a unique item or resource).

To help you on your quest, a large variety of NPCs drop by your town with the option to employ them: farmers, herders, trappers, guards, alchemists, fortune-tellers, craftsmen and more. Each character (including yourself) costs 1 food per day, and if you run out of food, you lose the game, so this is the first thing you’ll need to take care of. The food producers are the basis of each town, where the item producers (like craftsmen or alchemists) support you by producing the weaponry and potions you’ll need on your adventures or by producing gold by selling their goods to your local merchant. Guards can keep your town safe and are probably best suited to adventuring with you, other than high-power characters like high priests, wizards, necromancers and dragon herders.

You can go out to fight monsters on your own or take some of your town dwellers with you. You clear up the region map on a by-area basis, fighting about half a dozen monsters of increasing toughness. In doing so, you can also free up resources for your town by clearing out, for example, a rock quarry or iron mine. Some resources can also be cultivated without freeing them up (by planting an herb field within the town or importing iron), but this is gold-intensive. Still, there’s a good chance some resource you really need will be held by high-level monsters, and that is a good way around the problem. On top of that, fighting monsters and clearing out areas gives you XP to level up as well as fame, which allows you to recruit higher-level NPCs.

Your character can not die (unless you’re playing on hardcore difficulty), but that doesn’t mean dying is as penalty-free as it is in most hack ‘n slashes. Deaths bring heavy fame penalties, which can be pretty painful if you’re in the process of replacing low-level NPCs with high-level ones. You lose the game if either your fame or your food go into the negative, or if monsters raiding your town destroy it.

Combat is about as basic as it gets; you click on your opponent once and then just sit back and watch your character attack him. Opponents use close combat or ranged weapons, as well as magic, which comes down to fire/magic bolts and poison/curse spells. The PC can use close combat or ranged weapons as well as magic, though I found the game pretty hard to play using magic myself. Strategy isn’t much of a factor other than making sure your PC is well-equipped, trying to isolate individual enemies to fight, and taking a team of powerful followers with you if necessary.

You will find a lot of equipment on your adventures, though you won’t just pick up items for your character. A lot of the items you’ll find will go into decking out your followers: oats to help herders, tools or hammers to help craftsmen, salves or bandages to help doctors, and so on and so forth.

As you level up, you get to pick one stat to increase (attack, defense or health) and then get an extra perk, that gives a bonus of different sorts to your offensive skills (such as a bonus to offensive value or attack speed), your defensive skills (such as enabling you to heal outside of town) or your town management skills (such as giving extra gold from buildings, allowing you to research quicker or building cheaper).

Individual level-ups might not give noticeable boosts every time, but they have a cumulative effect, and you’ll find your character shaping up by giving special emphasis to his individual adventuring skills or to town management. I’ve had a playthrough with a dwarf warrior where most of my gold resources came from adventuring and,  equally, a playthrough with a goblin scientist where most of the production came from the town.

Technical Issues

I’ve had a hard time getting Hinterland to run. I would normally write this off as a quirk since my computer is hardly the ideal gamer build, but some quick research leads me to believe that I’m not the only one having trouble (almost every thread I’ve seen on this game has at least one person noting he or she couldn’t get it to run). The problems range from early Steam issues to patch-caused problems of invisible enemies to (my personal issue that seems to be happening to multiple people) having to reboot my computer just to start up the game. At times, the problems appear to be on the user end, with outdated drivers or full hard drives blocking the experience. But even after making sure everything was up-to-date, my issues remain.

When I finally do get the game to start, it takes a bit too long to load up a new game. This is not something I usually have that much issue with, but Hinterland does not really look like the kind of game that needs the kind of resources to excuse long loading times. What’s more, Hinterland’s formula is addictive but is addictive in short spurts, which works better if the game is easy to exit and start up again (think PopCap games), and this increases the severity of the technical issues and long loading times as they impact enjoyment of the game even more than such issues normally would.

I would be slightly less irked by these technical issues if I were convinced Tilted Mill was pulling out all stops to help fix these problems. Instead, the game was delayed for a while, not for bug-fixing but for added content, and since then Tilted Mill has put out another content pack as well, which seems to have caused some additional problems. Not really putting the priorities in the right order, I would say.

I have little to complain about in the graphics & sound departments. The sounds are a bit off (the troll screeches in particular I don’t really get), but the music is solid. The graphics are simple but effective, and they are high quality enough for you to enjoy the look of your pimped-out town or character.

Gameplay Issues

This may sound familiar, but Hinterland is a game that tries to be two things, and ends up not being all that good at either. This is a judgment you’ll often hear on these kinds of gender-blenders, but it caught me off guard for this title, as the gameplay foundation is solid and low-concept, meaning it should be easy enough to mix town building and hack ‘n slash gameplay as long as you keep it fun. And Tilted Mill does not fall for the obvious trap of trying to do too much and ending up with an inconsistent mess; they just might have gone too far in the other direction and ended up doing too little.

Don’t get me wrong, Hinterland does succeed in simply being fun. The foundation of worldbuilding and character-building complementing one another is solid. Tilted Mill did manage to combine the two so that you are concerned and having fun with both, which means neither one needs to be able to stand on its own.

Which is good, because both fall somewhat short on how fleshed out they are. I’d say the town building gameplay is probably better developed, but it too lacks a certain something: a relevant choice to make, one that would offer unique paths of town development and thus offer more variety. At one point, you choose to go to a temple of good or a temple of evil, and depending on that choice, you can get a necromancer or high priest, but other than that, the town development depends on limitations from the outside: whether you get the right resources or items to get the people you want. This means that selecting “randomize resources” for each session will make each experience more unique, but without it (and even with it), town development feels samey after a few sessions. I would say there is enough variety in types of NPCs, but the functions of different NPCs are simply too similar: farmers, herders and trappers all produce food with varying circumstances and bonuses, but they all basically do the same thing. A bard raises your town quality and a fortune teller/witch produces gold and potions, which is a very simple approach and just feels like squandering opportunities to do something more unique.

The experience is saved when you get the more unique, high-end NPCs (like necromancers and dragon herders) and deck out your high-level guards in high-quality magic items. This is, to put it simply, “pretty cool.” And, because it takes a while to get that far, it has a neat sense of accomplishment attached to it.

Turning on enemy raids is also something that helps more than you think it might. If you have all the time in the world to build your town, it isn’t very challenging. Since the only resource that is actively used up is food, there’s no need for balance beyond having enough farmers, herders and trappers. With raids, you will have to keep guards in mind, as the enemies can be pretty dangerous and too tough for you to fight on your own. The need to supply guards properly bumps up the importance of smiths, and in so doing, a layer is added to town building.

It is the hack ‘n slash gameplay where it kind of starts to give away at the seams. The tactic-less, click-once-and-wait combat is dull at best and isn’t helped by the sometimes odd interface. Pressing 1-4 to use a healing potion is fine, but it can be surprisingly awkward to use a boosting potion on yourself or one of your followers. But where the game really falls short is in variety, both for the PC and for the enemies.

All enemies do is attack straight on without much AI apparent, occasionally with poison attacks and occasionally with a chance to stun. A lack of an expansive magic system and the fact that any area is filled with enemies of about the same level make it all predictable: you’ll never suddenly be faced by a single super-high-level character or swarmed by countless small enemies. There are no area effects or circumstance-changing spells (except for curse, which doesn’t seem to do much or last long). The end result? Every fight pretty much feels the same, and whatever tactic works for you will keep on working for you every time you play.

Action RPGs, like it or not, always depend heavily on your ability to uniquely develop your character. It is understandable that there is less of this in Hinterland as characters are dumped after each session, but the lack of variety hurts the game in the long run. Other than the choice between adventurer and town manager, characters feel essentially the same. You’ll get different items, but with the only normal variables being offensive and defensive stats, the only cool extras you’ll get are occasional poison or fire-magic items. And that’s just not enough to prevent combat characters from feeling the same every single time. And this goes back to the conceptual problem mentioned at the start of this review: the fact that this game’s concept is set in short gaming sessions is the best way to support town building, but ultimately hurts the depth and involvement of the hack ‘n slash gameplay and character development. This is a conflict of interests that does not have a right answer.

Conclusion

Hinterland is not a bad game by any measure. It never loses sight of the primary goal of simply being fun, and combines the two basic concepts it is based on better than many mainstream attempts to do so might. But the above-named flaws do stop it from becoming as involving as it could be, while the technical hiccups, if you’re unfortunate enough to encounter them, can be seriously frustrating, pulling down our gameplay score quite significantly.

Assuming you’re hiccup-free, Hinterland is probably an ideal game if you’re looking for fun low-concept gaming, best served in short sessions, and for those of us that enjoy both town management and hack ‘n slash gaming. It tries to walk a thin line between fun, simple gameplay and not becoming repetitive, and randomization of maps and resources does help in this, but in my opinion they did tilt it towards the simple a bit too much. It does end up feeling like it could spend a little more time in the oven, and as it is constantly getting patches and content updates, it might be wise to defer purchase for a while.