Why on Earth did I start playing this game, simply why? Oh, do not take this as a negative comment, I mean that in the most positive and excellent way. Allow me to elaborate.

Starting anew, the first group of gnomes begin carving out a kingdom

I introduce to you Gnomoria, a sandbox village management game by Robotronic Games. Gnomoria tasks you with taking a small wandering group of gnomes who have left their home kingdom in order to carve out a settlement and form a kingdom of their very own. You accomplish this by utilizing the gnomes, as well as their initial supplies. You begin in a randomly generated land, and from there, you must create a home for your little guys. Carve out a home for your gnomes and generally create anything you desire for your kingdom. In order to do this though, you need gnomes with the appropriate skills and tools in order to get your kingdom started. Any mining and digging requires a pickaxe, a gnome with good mining skills, forestry requires woodcutters and axes, farmland requires seeds, and able workers.

Does this formula sound familiar to anyone? If it does, you may very well be a Dwarf Fortress player, or at the very least heard of it. Gnomoria is heavily inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and it emulates many gameplay aspects of the game, but with its own brand of twists on the formula. I myself am an avid Dwarf Fortress fan, and I have logged countless hours creating kingdoms, building them up as marvelous beacons of wonder and wealth, and inevitably watching the kingdom crumble and fall as is the norm in any game of Dwarf Fortress. With each fallen kingdom I strive to build another, then another, and another, ad infinitum until I realize how much time I have spent on my virtual kingdoms – the countless hours of lost sleep on minutiae. Along comes Gnomoria, with the same addicting village management and kingdom creation gameplay. Again I must reiterate, why on Earth did I start playing this game?

Slowly but surely creating a majestic kingdom

While I do call upon Gnomoria‘s similarities with Dwarf Fortress, it creates its own brand of gameplay, and does so in a much prettier package. It uses a 2D isometric overhead style, complete with pixel sprites for every character and object. Gnomoria also sports a very impressive soundtrack. It has an assortment of music to accompany you whilst you build your kingdom. Easy-going and even jolly rhythms play while you build, mine, and farm; if goblins show up it will change to an ominous tone to signify their presence. The unique thing about the soundtrack is that it comes in two varieties, Classic and Orchestral. The Classic version uses an 8-bit style reminiscent of the NES era of games, whereas the Orchestral uses a more modern synthesized track to emulate an orchestral piece. This is an extremely nice touch, and the 8-bit style is a great nod to the retro era of games.

Gnomoria graphics

The gameplay is nice as well, and you create your kingdom by designating areas with various work commands. Then you create workshops which can create various items for your gnomes, followed by your kingdom’s source of food and drink. It all starts simple at first, but as you progress in the game you require more specialized workshops and tools, which of course needs a skilled gnome for that particular workshop. Certain items may need multiple workshops before it can be created, with more valuable items needing more additional steps. Thankfully, Gnomoria provides a bit of automation while creating these. As long as you have the required workshops and resources, you can have the items automatically requested for creation. Simply request an item to be made at the correct workshop, and after some time going you have your item, all made auto-magically and without the manual tedium.

From there on, everything is up to you as you cater to your own whim and fancies. Create an underground metropolis worthy to be called a kingdom or create an imposing fortress up on the surface. That is the joy of this game, seeing as it has no end goal to speak of, the fun of the game is what you make of it.

Goblins, professional soldiers and a ragtag militia. FIGHT!

While a lot of fun can be provided from Gnomoria, it does suffer from a few problems.The pacing seems a bit slow, certain tasks often get ignored from while gnomes putter off to do other things, and large maps tend to crash the game. I have also found that certain resources have bottlenecks that can severely stifle your kingdom, even to the point of failure. I have lost a kingdom due to my gnomes bleeding to death from simple injuries, simply because I ran out of bandages. Bandages are created at the tailor, but I lacked the materials needed for the creation of the workshop or its supplies, so all my gnomes eventually died off one by one.

This game may not be for everyone as it has a bit of a learning curve but once you get the basics down it gets easier. If you are a fan of Dwarf Fortress or sandbox village management games, give Gnomoria a go. The game is still under development and is currently available for purchase at various online distributors.

The kingdom secures its spot in history and has won its survival

Still unsure of Gnomoria? Let me give you an insight on my time with it. So far I have 19+ hours logged into Steam, this is the time while logged online. I do the majority of my gaming offline from Steam, so the majority of my game time has not been logged. That 19+ hours is merely a fraction of the total time I have put into the game. Heck, even a severe power outage problem in my community wasn’t enough to deter me from it. Rolling blackouts that lasted over a week plagued my hometown, and I still snuck in a few hours of game time during that period. I’m surprised I managed to pry myself away from the game long enough to write this article.

Now if you will excuse me, my kingdom needs some attention.

© 2014, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

Oil Magnate has a lot going for it. For a start, it’s one of painfully, worryingly few indie (or mainstream, for that matter) management/strategy sims on the Xbox 360.

The premise is pretty straightforward. You are an aspiring oil baron who must assess different prospective drill sites, buy the land and then fill your drums with black liquid gold, all while three rivals do the same and try to outdo you by fair means or foul. If that sounds exciting, this game is for you. If not, it might still be for you as long you don’t fall asleep during the tutorial. Although there’s still the matter of… No, I don’t want to mention that.

At the outset you can choose from four ‘missions’, which are basically definitions of the victory conditions. In one you must invest a specified amount of money over time, in another you must drive all your competitors out of business, and so on. The details of these missions can be tweaked, allowing you to make the game is easy or as difficult as you choose. You can adjust how much money you start with, how long you have to achieve the objective, and just how high the target figure is.

So far, so good. It’s all very professional. You can even choose the appearance of your office from a few options. This attention to detail is reminiscent of the classic management sims, the Sim City and Civilization series.

Traditionally, sim-type games don’t fit very well with consoles thanks to the clunkiness of navigating menus and maps with a controller. Playing Sim City 2000 on the Super Nintendo was like trying to eat noodles by gripping one strand at a time between a pair of fresh haddock. I’m not a fan of controlling games using a mouse and keyboard, but strategy/management games and MMORPGs are the exceptions. Here, though, it all controls quite well with the Xbox pad. The menus are simple groups of buttons that are easily negotiated with the left stick or d-pad, while the minigames that arise during certain tasks arguably handle better here than they would with PC controls.

These minigames are among the most notable features of Oil Magnate, serving to prevent the game becoming a boring stat-fest. Most commonly you will have to hold a twitching dot in the centre of a circle while drilling for oil, to represent keeping the drill on course. Should one of your wells catch fire, either by chance or thanks to sabotage, you have to run around the area using dynamite to kill the flames before too much damage is done. There’s also another minigame, but I don’t want to talk about it. No really, I’d rather not. Leave me in blissful denial for a while longer.

You’ll notice I mentioned sabotage. This is a nice feature that adds a bit of mischief to proceedings. Tired of buying, selling and drilling like a good little millionaire? Feeling pressured by your superhumanly astute business rivals? Go all Donald Trump on their asses and hire a terrorist to burn down their rigs and storage tanks, or deflate oil prices in their chosen market to cut down their profits. Oil is a dirty business, and don’t think for a moment that your rivals will be able to control their own barbaric fiscal impulses. On the other hand, you run a very serious risk of having your wells confiscated if you’re found out, so maybe you’d be better off sticking to the straight and narrow after all. The price of endorsing terrorism is being made slightly less rich. Who says indie games can’t be realistic?

Oh alright. Alright. I’ll tell you about the other minigame. I suppose I have no choice.

The third minigame is demonstrated in the game’s tutorial video, which makes it look simple. Unfortunately, as with everything else it shows you, the tutorial video is being slightly less honest than an East End market trader enticing you with his ‘nearly new’ plasma TVs.

I was all set to award Oil Magnate a 4 out of 5, maybe even leaning towards a 5 out of 5 depending on its longevity and replay value. The third minigame made me, in my darker moments, want to give it a 1 out of 5 and tell it to be grateful for my merciful nature. If I could punch a collection of digital information in the face, I would swing a haymaker at Oil Magnate with careless disregard for the state of my knuckles every single time I see the word ‘pipeline’.

I’m getting angry just thinking about it. This minigame is simple in principle, but ferociously difficult in practice. Sometimes when you try to sell your oil stocks, a message will appear telling you that your workers need help laying a pipeline. Presumably this is how they transport the oil to the buyer, though frankly, constructing mile after mile of entirely new pipe every time you make a sale doesn’t seem like efficient retail practice. When I order a new game online, I don’t find Amazon or Gamestation building a monorail to my doorstep.

For reasons we will never understand, this is how your oil is moved in the confused world of Oil Magnate, and like any good corporate fat cat you done your scruffiest trousers and wade in to help the plebs yourself when they’re shorthanded. You must connect the end of a pipe in the bottom right of the screen to another pipe-end in the top left. You extend the pipeline in any of four directions by pressing the corresponding face buttons, making sure you weave around hillocks and the corpses of other oil barons who did this once too often. Probably.

Promo pics for every minigame except the pipeline. It dare not show its face in my presence.

Simple, right? The problem is that you’re racing against an opponent who is trying to connect the other two corners for his own nefarious oil-retail purposes. Still doesn’t sound too bad; a bit of healthy competition to keep you on your toes. But your opponent is flawless; it will lay its pipe without hesitation in the perfect route, without the slightest error or pause to draw breath. You must avoid any sort of delay, since even half a second will cost you the ability to sell your oil this month.

Add to this the fact that some of the obstacles don’t seem to be obstacles at all, looking instead like just part of the ground. Further add to this the fun quirk of control that has pipes extending forward before turning; if you press X to extend left, it will go forward then left, resulting in running into obstacles that you thought you should be clear of.

I’ve played Oil Magnate for somewhere around six or seven hours so far, and out of the dozens of times the pipeline minigame has arisen, I’ve succeeded once.

You might think I’m over-emphasising one small problem, but this is very nearly a game-ruining flaw. You see, if you fail at the pipeline game and can’t sell oil that month, you haemorrhage money. Only this afternoon, one single pipeline game moved me from almost pole position to a miserable near-ruined mess in one month. I managed to slowly get out of the red (though still very much trailing behind the competition) over the course of the next few months, only to be hit by another two pipeline games in a row, utterly finishing off my oil business and costing me the game.

This has happened more than once. A lot more than once.

Compared to the pipeline fiasco, my other complaints – no save game facility and an unhelpful tutorial – are mere niggles. Oil Magnate had been a 4, maybe even a 5. Now it’s a 3, holding on by the skin of its teeth thanks solely to everything else about it being well executed.

As I said, Oil Magnate has a lot going for it. Mostly I quite enjoy it, and maybe you will too. It has enough management sim aspects to appease an anally retentive streak, but is simple enough to be reasonably accessible to management dunces such as me. The vampire of statistical tedium is warded off by the garlic of minigame diversions. Though the tutorial misses out most of the important stuff, and the inability to save your game if you realise your dinner is burning detracts from the experience, they’re just inconveniences.

The ill-conceived pipeline minigame, though, almost derails the whole thing. It can drop you from triumphant front runner to abject game-over in a matter of seconds, not because it demands skill but because it tricks you with poor visual design, confounds you with bizarre movement control, and demands computer-like perfection to defeat the eternally flawless CPU opponent. As someone who has been playing video games on a regular basis for 25 years, I have skills. But I can’t beat the pipeline problem, and sadly Oil Magnate itself can’t quite overcome it either.  A fun game, but every moment is a countdown to inevitable disaster.

Maybe it really is going for realism.

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2012 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.