What do you get when you cross a giant honey badger with a gnome?
We can try to find that out as Irreverend Opinions looks at Gnomoria.
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The Blurb
Simple and sweet, a town-management game where you can't directly control your subjects. Lead a small band of adventurous gnomes into the founding of a new colony, and defend them not only against starvation, but also hostile goblin raiders and hungry beasts!
The Good
Simple and fun once you get the hang of it, with a basic 'dig and build' approach to the world controls. Randomized terrain and gnome stats make this a slight blend into roguelike, which has both ups and downs. The in-game orchestra sound track is quite nice, and the game sounds are decent quality for a beta.
The combat is not difficult to understand; you can give instructions to your gnomes on how to conduct themselves in battle (I favor a kamikaze rush), and the enemies present a bit of variety in tactics as well; animals will run if hurt, and goblins will happily test your defenses.
The Bad
Poor graphics* and terrible default sound track. There's not very much to do (still early access at time of writing), and so the game can be very slow after a while. Strong learning curve with no starting instructions, and at time of writing resources can be difficult to get together for items needed for the game. Few explanations and warnings for events makes some facets of the game a bit challenging. The pathing AI can be a bit funny.
* 8-bit, might be your thing.
The Ugly
There isn't any. Nice game, still in beta.
Suggestions
An in-game recipe book would be nice (even if such was populated only by things you had discovered and 'theorized'). A gnomish flavour to menus would be good, perhaps naming the weaponsmith a swordificationator or something. More in-game notices that a gnome has just dug himself onto a cliff that he can't get down from and is at risk of starvation would be something I'd like to see.
The Summary
7/10, 8/10 if 8-bit graphics are your thing. Capable of standing up there with casual strategy sims for hours.
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This review is hosted for archival and backup purposes; the original can be found on Steam.
