The Horde

The Good
The Horde is a lot of fun. It combines real-time action elements with a SimCity style of planning that lets you place traps and barriers in your attempts to protect a growing village from rampaging monsters. This combination is nothing new but this game’s look and feel is rather novel and inventive. The graphics and music are excellent. Each land has its own specific look and theme song that really add a lot of depth and fun. The sound effects are clever and can be used as clues to where the horde is attacking. That familiar “moo” means one of your cows is in trouble and the “thumpthump” sound means that some monster is trying to beat down the walls to one of the villagers’ houses. Speaking of cows they are the single most important part of your economy (being the most expensive thing in the game) and have some of the best animation I have ever seen. When you watch them grazing and chewing their cud you won’t gasp like they did back in 1994 but you will be impressed. The city grows and changes in a very realistic way from season to season and since you have great control over the landscape you have to make some very important decisions. Houses and gardens are placed on the most fertile land and close to flowers and trees so if you remove too much of the natural landscape your population growth will slow down. Don’t chop down enough trees and there won’t be any room for new settlers! The maps are randomly generated for each land which allows for great replay value. There are even random events that make each game a little different from the last (this can be bad as well, see below). The full motion video movies are a little grainy but funny. While Kirk Cameron may be the star it’s the evil High Chancellor who steals the show with his over the top acting. I found myself playing just so I could watch his next scene. If you hate the idea of movies in your game you can skip them with a click of your mouse button, a nice touch.

The Bad
The biggest problem with the game is the interface and controls. Getting Chancey to run at the horde is easy but it also easy to get him to run INTO the horde. You can carry several items to help you do battle but selecting them is very unintuitive and frustrating. To change your weapon you have to right click and then drag your mouse around until the item you want appears in your selection box then right click to activate it. This might sound easy but in the heat of battle this process will spell your death many times. The simultaneous release of this game on the PC and several console systems reveal that the programmers probably spent more time play testing this game with a joystick instead of a keyboard and mouse. The save feature is also very limited and indicative of a console game. There are five levels that are broken up into the four seasons (you have to spend a year on each land). In the early seasons you are generally attacked by the weak and young hordlings but at the end of the year you will have to face the huge brutish adults which can easily crush you. Since you can only save at the beginning of each year you will probably spend most of your time replaying the first three seasons to get back to the last one again and again. Combined with the fact that the game gets hard very fast and there is no difficulty selection you will quickly reach a level that becomes too hard. The ability to save after each season would have helped immensely. The game is quick and requires you to use fast timing and reflexes but this is hampered because when too many enemies get on screen the game begins to stutter and slow down. A fast processor and lots of memory don’t seem to help at all. The random events, which will sometimes help you, can also be devastating. Certain events such as the “adopt a hordling program”, your knights demanding a pay increase, or even a meteor strike that takes out half your town can force you to reload the game from several levels back. The worst one of the bunch is when the High Chancellor finds your ATM card and steals a huge chunk of change from your bank account. In a game where money can spell the difference between moving to the next level and being sent to debtors' prison this seems rather cruel. The Horde offers a lot of accessories to help you in your fight but most are too expensive and offer very limited value. The knights and archers cost way too much money to justify using more than one or two of them and they can only protect a few inches of screen real-estate. The dopey dragon sounds like a great investment and indeed he can spray fire from above like some kind of medieval air strike. With perfect timing and luck this will take out one or two of the baddies but it will usually take out several of your buildings and livestock in the process. The economics of the game are cumulative so that money earned from one level can be carried over to the next. This is fine but it will stump new players when certain purchases early on will prevent them from buying what they really need further down the line. This can become rather tedious forcing a reload from several level back so that they can save and earn more money.

The Bottom Line
A fun and inventive game that is only hampered by its control and saving system. A few small changes in game balance could have made this a classic. If you can find it I suggest you try it out.