In a slight diversion today, I bought the just-released Hinterland based on the previews and discussion about it I’d seen in some forums. It’s kind of an odd game, being a combination of an action-RPG like Diablo, and a city-building game. You have to develop a settlement, hiring visitors in order to fulfill roles in the village like farming, crafting, hunting, defense, etc., but your ultimate goal is to wipe out all of the evil creatures in the surrounding countryside by venturing out and combating them head-on, by yourself or with some villagers in tow to help you out.

Both aspects of it are fairly simple: the people have levels, equipment they’re holding, and attack/defense stats derived from that, and combat is just holding down right-click on the monsters, nowhere near the depth of Diablo. And maintaining the village is fairly straightforward: make sure you have enough food-producers to cover everyone, and try to get at least one villager of each type and upgrade buildings when possible. Things get a little more complicated later on as some villagers won’t be usable until you liberate certain resource types, and you have to decide when to switch between research and production for the crafters, but that’s about it.

Still, it’s a decent amount of fun for what it is, being a cheap game from a small company. I only played one game tonight at the easy difficulty on a small map, just to get a feel for it, so I’ll have to try medium/medium next. The pace was a bit faster than I expected, but I still managed to win fairly easily in about two hours.