Hinterland: Orc Lords PC Game Review

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Your ultimate goal in Hinterland: Orc Lords is to wipe the map of your opponents by using hack and slash game play and building up your city to attract tougher fighters and champions to help you conquer the territory around your city. Basically, this video game combines elements of Diablo and SimCity into a simple game for casual gamers to enjoy and learn the basics about RTS games. The game play is simple, yet more than adequate to entertain casual gamers and hardcore gamers alike looking for a simple and basic RTS game that entertains.

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Hinterland: Orc Lords isn't an adventure video game for the fanatical hardcore gamer looking for a deep and engrossing adventure title with layers of depth and detail built into the game play. All the game play elements are solid but simple in construction and detail, but will soon bore a hardcore gamer who has played more engaging and engrossing video games in this genre.

Hinterland: Orc Lords doesn't have an impressive visual presentation with detail and nice textures. The characters look generic in construction and the medieval environments are a little sparse. In addition, the animations of the characters as they interact in the environment are very stiff and unnatural looking. They did include a wide range of characters models, from giant ogres to tiny spiders skittering around the low level resources surrounding your city, but none of these elements had any unique style or charm to entertain you.

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Hinterland: Orc Lords includes a musical score that isn't any better than the graphical presentation. The included songs range from rousing and energy filled tunes to slow and forgettable songs that should have been left out. Only a few of the songs appear to be appropriate for the action happening on the screen when the songs are playing, which is hard to understand. Almost makes one think they didn't listen to the songs as they were playing this video game or the music wasn't playing at the time.

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Hinterland: Orc Lords is the same basic video game that Tilted Mill originally made years ago, with two new Orc characters to play, and that's it. If you played this video game years ago, there's no real reason to buy it again for two new characters and the same game play.

You build your city by paying money you make to NPC characters in order to get them to settle in your city, which increases the strength of your forces. Every NPC has a specialty, from producing food and buying items to raising skeletons. To get more powerful NPCs to settle in your city, you need to collect more money, gain fame for your deeds, and grab the special items you'll find in the territory surrounding your city. At the same time you need to gain access to all the resources around your city that you need and protect them. You can do a lot of the work yourself but you'll need the help of the citizens of the city to clear the map around the city.

The NPCs you take into the field with you need to be selected very carefully each time you leave. NPCs who you take out of the city and into the wilderness will be busy with you and not doing their job in the city. This can leave your city without a doctor if you take him into the field and your production of health potions is going to go down. Therefore, you need to think a bit about which NPCs you use at particular times and for specific tasks. All the included elements are useful and well integrated, just not overly complicated, which is great for entertaining casual gamers.

Hinterland: Orc Lords is a great PC video game to introduce casual gamers to the RTS genre and has enough depth and detail to entertain a hardcore gamer for an hour or so, before it becomes boring and they turn it off.