Don’t worry, we didn’t spot anyone too upsetting or recent in the roster. Most times you’ll start with biblical figures like Eve and Matthew but as you progress you’ll get ‘Legends’ to turn up like Nero or Jack the Ripper who each have their own cool effects on the sinners around them. There is quite a bit of humour derived from the names of these guys too. For some this will be blood, others will be most affected by fire, and it’s your job to make sure there’s a place for them to go. A sinner will need food, water and rest, and you’ll need to maximise the suffering you get by building the torture chamber that matches what each sinner is most scared of. If you fail to do so, they will lose their sanity and pass into Limbo, where you’ll have to buy their souls back. To get into the nitty-gritty of the gameplay, you’ll need to extract suffering from your sinners while keeping them sane by meeting their needs. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, however, and if the theme and genre align to sound like a fun time for you, have fun.Build the right facilities to “take care” of your sinnersīut your coworkers are secondary to the sinners put into your dubious care. Everything else is just as basic as you can get when it comes to city builders and colony management games. Overall, Hell Architect has a few things going for it, mostly its art and sense of humor. While sand box mode gets boring quick, the various scenarios are designed to test your skills against challenges not found in sand box mode. What they should have done was take Hell Architect’s much more fun scenarios, and chained them together to form a campaign-or at least featured them more prominently. The one you’ll probably jump into after the tutorial is the sand box mode, and honestly, that’s too bad. There are multiple ways you can play Hell Architect. You use those materials, along with the suffering and essence you gathered, to create buildings to make food, drink, ways to get around, torture devices and more. You expand to make areas to create various buildings, and mine materials like iron, coal, and crystals. It’s played from a sidelong 2D perspective which, when zoomed out, gives the impression of creating a giant ant farm in a hellscape-which is, you know, pretty damn cool. Screenshot: Hell Architectīuilding in Hell Architect works as it does in most colony sims. Conversely, there’s a lot of work that goes into keeping your souls alive, fed, and happy-lest they be taken to that other place, and not toiling in your boiling underworld. I mean, you literally harvest energy from these hapless souls by either torturing them, or outright killing them to harvest their essence. You do have to be funny when dealing with subject matter that is a little dark. I really like Hell Architect’s art style, and its sense of humor. That’s great, but gameplay-wise, Hell Architect does very little to stand out from its peers, except for its sense of humor. It’s like developer Woodland Games wanted to come up with a fun, somewhat subversive concept to build an amusing colony sim over, and hell is what they came up with. You know when you walk into a Chinese restaurant, and they have the same menu pictures as the last Chinese restaurant, and you think, “damn, there must be a start-up kit for Chinese restaurants.”? Well, that’s what Hell Architect feels like. But while Hell Architect certainly has the tongue in cheek humor and cutesy art style to make hell’s suffering look less hellish, it has some severely phoned-in gameplay that can best be described as “basic.” Screenshot: Hell Architect I love its concept: you’re the architect of hell, and you have to create the perfect torture chamber for those poor damned souls that drop into your domain. It’s a decent 2D base building and colony management game. Okay, maybe I’m starting off a little harsh. I think I’ve had Dungeon Keeper as a standard in my head for so long, it’s always a massive disappointment when a game comes along, promises “evil” and is just a mediocre take on an already established genre, just with an “evil” theme put on top of it. In it, you play as a malevolent dungeon host you breeds nasty creatures and sets up traps to defend their dungeon from goody-goody adventurers. I think the first time I was introduced to the concept of playing the bad guy in a video game was Bullfrog’s classic Dungeon Keeper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |