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| early impressions by Bananadine 11/28/2010, 1:24pm PST | ||||
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| It's like The Sims, but grittier and more ambitious. Awesome!
The "interface" everybody complains about--basically the style of the menus and the general graphical style--is pretty easy to tolerate once you learn it. Cool! The parts of the interface I never hear people complain about are terrible. After traversing a rough learning curve, I can pretty easily give my dwarves the commands I'm allowed to give them. But then I can't easily see what the result is. How many of my dwarves are happy? How many are starving? Where are the starving ones? Which important construction jobs have been arbitrarily suspended? Why doesn't it hurt my mining and building efforts much to let everybody starve for years on end while I struggle to figure out the farming system? What happened to that squad of guards or whatever that I made? Why doesn't anything seem to really matter, except insofar as it affects the complexity of the engine's pathfinding tasks? For me at least, coaxing the engine into running at more than two frames per second is the game's only real challenge so far, despite that my computer is fast, my fortress is pretty simple, and my dwarves and animals are fairly few. Not cool. I think I'm going to end up abandoning the game because of this. It seems like you have to constantly babysit your workshops and whatnot to make sure they all have the right materials and tasks. Or maybe there's a way to automate that better that I haven't run into yet? So far it seems pretty crappy. As in Minecraft, the water is the most interesting thing I've found to play with. Unlike the dwarves, it behaves predictably yet dramatically, and can be controlled by the player in an interesting and straightforward way. I suspect that, also as in Minecraft, exploring natural caves will be the other most interesting part of the game, at least the first couple of times I find them. So far the main point of the game seems to be free-form construction with a lot of micromanagement mixed in. Minecraft plus Master of Orion III. :( |
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