Reviews - SketchyGalore

For years, I've been hoping and praying that someone... ANYONE would take the concept of a Dwarf Fortress style fantasy village sim game and make it into an actual marketable-quality game. No offense to DF, of course, but it has the accessability of Mt. Everest and a Rubix Cube of a UI.

Gnomoria may just be the answer to that prayer. Though the game seems to have come out of nowhere, the functionality, presentation, and potential of this one surpass any alpha I've ever played.

The game itself sticks quite close to its DF roots, but rather than being a rip-off, it feels more like a logical progression. It's clear that the developer loved that game and made a worthy homage to it by including many of the little details that made it great. Though all of the systems are still being padded out (there are, for example, not as many types of materials, enemies, etc as the developer obviously plans to have eventually), the majority of them work beautifully already and seem like an excellent foundation for something even bigger. A few familiar appearances include individual stats/skills for each resident, a value system based on material (and possibly craftsmanship in the future), multiple materials to make the same items and colorful presentations of what you've made (an oak workshop looks different than an applewood workshop), rediculously deep mineable procudurally generated maps (102 floors below the surface, so far), extremely good procedural land feature generation, the ability to build up into the air as well as into the ground, and my personal favoirte, detailed and brutal text-based number-free combat logs.

This is, of course, all wrapped up in one beautiful pixely presentation. The characters/enemies look great and seeing your creations in a colorful, detailed way gives it that visual gratification that DF was always lacking. I'm running out of space for this review, but I definitely believe this could be an amazing project, well worth funding and supporting.