Gnomoria

Gnomoria

released on Feb 23, 2016

Gnomoria

released on Feb 23, 2016

Gnomoria is a sandbox village management game where you help lead a small group of gnomes, who have set out on their own, to thrive into a bustling kingdom! Anything you see can be broken down and rebuilt elsewhere. Craft items, build structures, set traps and dig deep underground in search of precious resources to help your gnomes survive the harsh lands. Build your kingdom and stockpile wealth to attract wandering gnomads to your cause, but be wary of also attracting enemies!


Released on

Genres


More Info on IGDB


Reviews View More

Been recently really addicted to this game, but now I've pretty much "finished" it which is to say, once you gain the Automatons you can get more jobs done by going well over the population cap. Especially as the Gnomes seem to be unable to breed.

The learning curve can be a bit steep, especially when you run into golems and it's not obvious what to do so it's similar to Banished in that form. However I do have a few gripes.

Mushrooms.

Now you have the option to have a underground farm and there is only the Mushrooms. Now at first this sounds simple like normal farms that need to be on the highest clear elevation so that they get sunlight so the underground ones much have shelter above and that's it, right? Nope.

There's guides specific for this because attempting to build them is so difficult because you need the dirt to be mud. This obviously happens due to water, however if it's sheltered where are you going to get the water from? The best guide has been creating holes above so rain falls down these falls and creates mud-pots. However, the areas exposed then become grass so they can't become mud.

The only other option is, through the invention tech-tree, you can build a pump to draw up water up and into the farm, but this has it's own sets of problems as all soil absorbs the water so you need to find a particularly huge area of water or find some genius way to move the water across, which is just so annoying.

Again, very fun and addictive sim game with a learning curve, but not as harsh of a learning curve as say, Banished.

Art style and actual visuals was good but it was shortly trumped by games like Rimworld since it didn't seem to have huge substance

I like the art style but could not figure out how to play this game properly.

Gnomoria is superficially similar to Dwarf Fortress, but in 3d. I found it to be an almost entirely worse experience.

The visuals are the only thing that are an upgrade from Dwarf Fortress (and I wouldn't even say that if you are using a texture pack with DF), and they get the job done. It looks basically like a 3d rendering of what you would get out of DF. The spritework is fine, but not incredible.

The interface in Gnomoria is pretty atrocious. There are a ton of nested menus and getting your gnomes to do anything is pretty tedious. It has an auto-queue system, so if you make a table it will automatically queue the planks the table requires to be made, but this only manages to make things barely functional.

There are about 30 workshops in Gnomoria for making various things, many of which have unclear function until you build them and seem to be arbitrarily different (there is a stonemason, a stonecutter, and a stonecarver... why!?). I don't know why this is the case or what purpose this could possibly serve. It makes the development of this game feel ad-hoc and arbitrary, rather than towards some sort of goal.

Despite the complexity of workshops, the game itself is extremely simple. There isn't much to do (beyond building more workshops!?) and things get stable (and boring) pretty quickly.

There just isn't much to recommend this game at all, unfortunately. Try Dwarf Fortress if you want depth and Rimworld if you want polish.