Steam NextFest First Impressions: Orc Warchief
Hello and welcome to part three of six in my Steam NextFest demo extravaganza.
So far we have had a look at Creature Keeper, a very sub-par monster collecting game whose only saving grace is a nice soundtrack; and Dread Dawn, a very sub-par open world zombie game that filled me with the most disappointing disappointment.
Today we're having a look at Orc Warchief, a strategy city builder. It invites you to become a warchief of your own orc clan, build up your settlement, hunt for resources, train your warriors, etc, etc, etc. It sounds pretty standard for a strategy colony builder thing, but I love a good colony sim and here's hoping this particular one grabs me.
You can have a look at it yourself on it's Steam Store page, by clicking here!
Let's see if I have finally chosen a winner in this so-far-disappointing NextFest.
Upon starting the game, we are greeted with a couple of orcs having a conversation... and I literally laughed my arse off. They're orcs, but they have the worst most typical human voices ever. It was so bizarre. Even my partner looked over and what-the-fuck'd the cinematic.
At the end, the female encourages her "big boy" to get to work. Dear, God.
It was just awful.
(Reminds me of when SWTOR was first released. On Hutta, behind the bar, is a Gamorrean pig-person who, when clicked, spoke to you in a human's voice. It always amused me and I was disappointed when they fixed it.)
With the horribly-voiced cinematic over and done with and out of the way, we enter the tutorial.
It's pretty standard, just as I thought. My only issue with the tutorial is that there are quite a few spelling errors in it. In fact, there's an error in the screenshot above. Can you find it?
I get my peons to start chopping down some trees, harvesting berries from the nearby berry bushes, and building up some tents so everyone has a roof over their heads.
It's all very easy and just as you would expect if you've played a few of these types of games.
One thing they've implemented differently to other games in this genre, though, is the clan leader's tent. You can have four leaders for the various day-to-day runnings of the clan. You can choose any of the orcs, all of whom have their own morality and ambitions.
Once you set your leader, a talent tree opens up based on how much shamanic spirit you're channeling and you can further enhance your peons. You can only choose certain options though, based on the orc and his morality you've chosen.
Then we can see how the tribe as a whole it doing.
On one page we can see our leaders, the overall morality, productivity, and happiness. I am, however, a bit confused because apparently happiness lowers productivity?
I'm not sure that should be a thing, but okay.
In the above screenshot there are two spelling mistakes.
That aside, this part reminded me a bit of Age of Empires. You know, when you have enough food and whatever and you can upgrade your town centre to reach the next age? That's basically this. Once you have enough of certain resources, you can advance your tribe to the next level and unlock more stuff to build to benefit your clan.
And with that, the tutorial is basically over and you can just fool around with your peons, build a few things and see how it goes.
You are given a basic guide of what you should be doing: grow your clan, keep their morale up, make some war axes, build a sacred path, etc.
Honestly, though... I kind of stopped at this point, not seeing the point in continuing on.
It's an alright game, nothing to rave about and nothing really to rant about either. It just exists. I really like the premise of it though, being a warchief of a great orc clan... but in actual gameplay, it's not that interesting.
As always, though: this is just a demo and that could change during development. But for now... meh.
See you next time for another Steam NextFest first impressions! 😊