Hinterland Review
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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 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 makes 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 on the long run. Other than the choice between adventurer or 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 one 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.
