Alphas/Betas/Demos/Early AccessImpressionsWritten By: Jonathan A.

(Impressions) Gnomoria

So I recently played a decent chunk of the village management / Strategy Sim named Gnomoria.  Let me tell you, it’s a butt kicker!  I’ve had a ton of fun with this game so far even in it’s Early Access phase and they are putting out fixes with relatively good speed.  When this game is finished, it’s going to be an even more awesome game.

First up, even though it’s in the Early Access/Beta phase of its life, it’s a fully fleshed out game.  In the same vein as Towns and A Game of Dwarves, you start with a group of settlers (this time Gnomes, duh) and start to build up your village.  You have to build fields for crops and animals (no fences needed the animals are afraid of what’s beyond the designated color zone I guess), and mine for resources. You do all of this while maintaining food, drink and keeping a watchful eye on attackers. With the different materials you find in Gnomoria, you can create more elaborate and nifty looking structures to house and “kingdomify” (yeh, it’s a word)* your Gnomes.

Building wasn’t as easy as in the other games as everything felt a little hard to find.  Even after “figuring” it out, I still tend to get lost in the collective of buttons and options and “where was that button to make a distillery” again?  You know how it is.  However, one thing I feel I learned a bit too late is that right-clicking opens up and easy to use option list that has mostly everything you’ll need.  I kind of wish there was a tutorial mode.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/224500/
Graphically this game is similar to Towns, but with a more fun SNES look.  (See what I mean about the right-click menu?)

Oh, did you say you wanted options in a sim game?  Well this game has a lot.  A whole freak’n lot of them and it almost borders on some “condition” to what you can do.  You can change the jobs of your Gnomes and or create new jobs out of the job list and enlist them into the local militia because you need defense!  There are tons of different crafting options to be able to… well… craft items like walls, crates, statues of Gnomes, and traps to help defend yourself from attacking enemy jerks.

2 goblins killed basically everyone.
2 goblins killed basically everyone thus ending game one.
Seriously... what the crap is with two goblins wrecking everything?!?!
Seriously… what the crap is with two goblins wrecking everything?!?!  This ended game two.
No goblins this time, just a randomly spawning super angry badger. Killed most of my people with not damage to itself. Well at least it wasn't a goblin.
No goblins this time, just a randomly spawning super angry badger.  You can’t really see him, but he’s hiding in the corpses of my felled Gnomes in the right corner.  Killed most of my people with not damage to itself. Well at least it wasn’t a goblin… but that was the end of game 3.

The last time I died it was due to starvation.  Yeh well… that one was mostly my fault.  Turns out you can’t grow trees without sunlight.  Hey, don’t give me that!  You can’t blame a guy for trying.  Having everything underground would have been super convenient… if another badger wouldn’t spawn.

So far I’m loving this game.  Even though I’ve spent more than enough hours in this game only to die horribly every time.  You’ve got to somehow manage defense as well as making a working village.  With the eventuality of being able to make traps to help defend my base and build up a larger army, this game has some serious potential!  While not being too innovative, it’s a fun & interesting advancement in the genre and well worth your time and money.

Let me know if you can get farther than me and send me pictures of your village if you build something awesome!

 *Kingdomify isn’t actually a word.

Jonathan Amarelo Sig

Love it or hate it, let me know!