Gnomoria

I supported/purchased this game long ago when it was still in early early development and own it on a different platform. I've enjoyed my time with it and still return to play it every once in a while. I love the music, I love the graphics and it never crashed for me (on Windows 7&8). It delivers what it promises and the price makes it a catch but (in my personal opinion) it has two major flaws. One is that there is no explanation such as a text that explains which crafting bench does what and a development tree or advancement hierarchy of sorts which would normally tell you that you have to, for example, craft a certain item made by a certain crafting station so that you can make a more advanced crafting station to make fine ingredients and/or produce. You can figure out that the crude workbench is the first thing you have to set up but after that all types and sorts of craftables are presented in a pool which is not organized. It's like a soup and you have to dig through it by trial and error to figure out what order you have to do things, and there is actually a specific order. This makes starting the game and learning it quite frustrating. The second major flaw is the behaviour of gnomes. I think there is still something wrong with it. Sometimes they just stay idle when they're not sleeping and do nothing even when there are no mining jobs while there are jobs such as crafting, hauling, foraging, tree chopping lined up waiting for them (mining is always prioritized that's why I mentioned it), and I'm aware of priority setting and job assignments, doesn't help. This sometimes causes chokes in production. From early development to release I never managed to get a big kingdom of gnomes like the ones shown on plenty of screenshots so the behaviour thing might be my shortcoming. The lack of or non-existence of any guidence, even a basic tech-tree, however is definitely problematic. You have to be a solid wiki reader to overcome that steep learning curve in this game.

I bought this game on a whim after failing to get into dwarf fortress and reading great things about this as an alternative. I got my fix already playing rimworld (still do actually) but wanted to get into something more complex. The difficulty is quite steep, pretty harsh learning curve but there are many tutorials out there and starter guides to help beginners. Thus I won't be complaining about the difficulty, as it is a feature IMHO. This is what I wanted! I wanted it to be punishingly hard and complex, while aesthetically accessible. If only the game wouldn't crash and render the current savegame corrupted! Not sure what I would've rated the game if I was able to play longer, but this is a complete show stopper. You invest hours into a new colony and try to get everything going and then the crash occurs and you can't continue developing your colony as the savegame will always crash on load. Being a *nix nerd the first thing I did was of course googling the error message and to my horror I found numerous people with *nix and Mac OSX machines having the same problem and no support given from the dev. Apparently they had someone else port the game to Mac/Linux and never bothered to fix bugs, but rather disappeared after releasing version 1.0 of the game. Instead of properly porting the game, said external dev seems to have written a somewhat hacky wrapper. For anyone with the same problem, this is the error message "[ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object" users of another gaming community have traced it to the sound subsystem and there is a temporary fix, which involves unpacking the executable and then editing a source file to disable the sound subsystem altogether... The good thing about this: I have picked up dwarf fortress again and am determined to learn how to play it properly and utilize the many free tools available to aid players (DFHack & stonesense, PyLNP).

The game is quite difficult to use and that makes an otherwise good game frustrating. It doesn't provide much guidance and I can never tell whether an issue I'm having is a bug or an intended mechanic that I'm not understanding.

I played this game for quite some time, and I really enjoyed it, it was well done, intriguing and had the right amount of challenges. I encountered some bugs but thought ok, it's an early access, it'll be fixed at some point. But then the developers gave up, didn't continue working on the game and just abandoned it. So as much as I had a good time, don't spend a dime here and go play Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld.