The king has decreed your character is going to untamed lands and carve out a slice of civilization for your monarch. That is the start and end for Hinterland’s plot. Over the course of the game the king will demand tribute, such as access to iron or souls. If you succeed you gain fame and maybe an item. If you fail you lose fame. If you go negative for too long you lose. If you die, you lose fame as well.
As you gain fame you gain access to better people wanting to set up shop in town. To get these people your town has to have gold and you have to have enough fame, which can be gained via adventures and townspeople themselves. To support people living in your town you need food. So far as management goes, you click on their building and equip them, issue orders, etc. Only problem here is unlike every other real time game in existence you cannot do this while Hinterland is paused. Not there is much management required, but this is a pet peeve.
There is a nice balance in Hinterland for city management, adding another layer is if you want to have an adventuring party you have to pull people from town to help. That means they will not be able to make items, earn revenue or generate food. This is less of an issue as the game progresses and your fame increases as your town will be at a surplus and the quality of followers drastically improves.
Outside of farmers, ranchers, guards, priests, innkeeper, merchants and trappers… the rest of the citizens of your town makes items or money. The items warlocks, smiths, etc make are an iffy proposition as you never get to tell them what to make. Honestly the only citizen who makes regularly useable objects is the herbalist / doctor who makes mostly healing potions and you will need a lot of those. I found it was more useful for these specialists make gold rather than objects. While you can sell items your craftsmen make to a merchant, they always sell for one gold… regardless if it is an amulet of power or a rusty dagger. This is a real breakdown in the game play of Hinterland and gives looting and crafting an unrewarding feel.
Addressing the RPG element of Hinterland is straightforward; there is no real role playing involved in the game, there are no plot points you have to agonize over or decisions to be made that will steer the course of the plot. You kill everything on the map and you win. Where Hinterland takes from RPG’s is the character building. Your PC has three stats: attack, defense and health. Each of these is increased after a level is gained. Also when a level is gained your character gets a perk like more gold is made from your town, healing outside of town or having increased attack speed. It is simple, but these choices do impact game play and are mostly satisfying. The only problem is Hinterland is a closed system, so your choices may not be explained very well or getting to them is a mystery.
Combat is simple. The goal of Hinterland is to clear the map for the king. The land is on a grid dotted with encounter areas. Clear the area and either gain a resource or additional treasure. There is a nice mix of stragglers and groups so approaching an area can be a challenge. Each area is marked with a counter that designates how challenging it is. Not surprising areas close to your town are easy, the further rout the difficulty increases. A knock in Hinterland is that most areas have one type of creature, each of which has one graphic for it. So a troll always looks like a troll regardless of level or subtype.
Throughout the game raiders from these areas will assault your town. Typically these parties are at your character’s level or slightly higher. You can choose to have citizens fight or take flight. Most of the time I had townsfolk flee and would build a party of my best fighters and take on the raiders, or go solo once I had ballistae towers going. I learned the hard way that having townsfolk defend themselves is a quick way to burn through townspeople, some of which are hard to replace.
Actually fighting is simple. Click on a target, move potions to your characters portrait if injuries stack up, click on a new enemy once the one you are fighting dies (or run away). There are no special moves, attacks or anything else. You attack with a bow or melee weapon and that is it. You followers have a poor mind of their own in combat. They will run after enemies on site, regardless if the enemy is once that you can beat or what their health is. Luckily you can tell followers to go home or if the fight is gritty they have a chance to run away to town if they are too injured. An injured follower cannot work in their building either.
System requirements for Hinterland are quite modest. It should be able to run on any current laptop or computer made in the past five years. Its load times however are very slow, why this is I cannot figure out beyond poor coding by the developers.
The graphics in Hinterland are fair. Your village as it grows looks very nifty. The surrounding hinterland, is an uneven proposition. The graphics are repetitive and many areas deeply resemble other areas. Enemies and people are also nicely done, but given there is one graphic for each there is zero variety, the dark elf you fought in your first encounter will look like the dark elf in the last encounter you may fight in. As your character and followers gain equipment that is represented graphically so for them the singular base graphics for them becomes irrelevant. An annoyance in Hinterland is that it is a fixed perspective isometric game. You cannot zoom in, zoom out, or rotate. It should not have been a burden of the developers to offer this kind of display.
A miscellaneous note about Hinterland, while you can save you progress it is only when you exit your game. Otherwise it is an ironman proposition. Setbacks and mistakes stay with you and that has cost me games where I either lost too much fame or made some bad decisions that came back to haunt me.
Overall I cannot say Hinterland is a great game, but it is a fun game. Hinterland is a game I would have paid ten dollars for, not twenty. Overall the game play elements are fused together in a way that works, but its lack of depth in regards to economics, combat and graphics are what holds it back from being more than an afternoon of fun every once in a while.
