We've not had an update here for a while as I've been distracted with other longer titles that are outside the scope of what I cover here. So I searched my steam library for something unplayed that I could get through quickly.

A card/deck building game! That's something I rarely touch! Northmark: Hour of the Wolf ended up not being what I was expecting. The game is on the simpler side and attempts to use a lot of humour and pop-culture references to drive the story.

You play as a random level 1 hero, a total nobody with little in the way of skills aside from walking and a personality of near zero charisma. A person of high nobility is shot with a poisoned arrow by an assassin, which means you are the best person for the job of going to find a cure. Some monks have it at a monastery, and a quick task later you have it and are back to the starter town. So, main quest over in a few minutes. Well Done!

Of course, the git then goes back to looking down at you and getting drunk on wine. You're then tasked with solving the mess of the lands. Humans, being the absolute racist arseholes that they are immediately blame the elves or dwarves for attacks and incursions in human territories. Mostly the elves get the blame, from a stereotypical bad-guy named Eclan who has evil eyebrows and purple cloak. You know as soon as you see him he'll be the big bad at the end.

And then... Well honestly it is a bunch of short stories strung together to get you to visit the various kingdoms of the land. And various pop-culture references appear as you explore. If you can call having an orang-utan (Egad! Oook!) librarian and the number 42 references. I like Discworld and HGTTG, but they feel awfully out of place, even in a world full of anachronisms.

The game is mainly made of two parts. The RPG mode and the card battles.

The RPG has you navigating around a large world map visiting various locals and talking to people to initiate quests. You can also visit shops to buy new cards for the battle game. Most soon become redundant or obsolete.

But there is a small amount in the realm of hidden object gameplay on town screens. And part of this is a little bit of bad design. In very faint flashing symbols are hotspots that lead you into the mentioned shops and locals. I only found these the first few times by clicking around the screen as I thought the game crashed on me when I got to the first town.

Something more obvious would of been nice here. But I can understand it for the second type, which are hidden stashes/caches of gold. It is only a tiny amount, but it does allow you to buy some basic starter cards.

And then there are the secret chests. Instead of numbers there are a rotating sets of letters and a riddle. Most are easy to guess, the others I had to start a brute force attack until an obvious word started to show as I had no idea how the solution related to the riddle. Helps that each tumbler only has a few letters each.

Neat though. Beats using a text-parser if you're not a good speller or the keyboard is outside of arm reach and you are feeling lazy.

The card game is played as a 3vs3 battle against the enemy AI with recruited individuals in the form of cards. They each have their own base defence values and some unique abilities.

Each action played is a random selection of 7 cards at the bottom of the screen from your battle deck of a chosen 12. If you don't have a full 7, then the empty spaces are filled with random low level cards. It creates an odd situation where you can end up leaving one blank in the hopes of generating a small healing card. Duplicates can't be chosen as your deck, but can form part of the 7 in play. You'll need to have a mix so that you don't run out of attack options.

As you progress, more powerful cards are unlocked that have a higher attack value in physical, fire, ice, poison, or mental power. If the card has a higher value than the opponents defence of the same type then you do damage to a positive sum value.

I don't play this genre often, so my solution to getting past a strong opponent was to buff one of my players with attack boosts then wallop a monster with a couple of hits to take them out. This got me to pretty much the end game. The final two battles just had me switch out some high power attacks to lower powered ones that hit all enemies at once, but have less chance of being blocked.

But honestly there does not feel like there is much to this. Unless I'm missing something major. Buff your team, cripple the enemy, then hit them with a axe, sword, or magical snowball. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

This game is a bit of an oddity. I was not expecting to last long but made it to the final area in ~2 hours before it was getting late that I had to switch it off for sleep.

Safe to say despite the out of place anachronisms and shallow gameplay, it kept me occupied and entertained. Grab it on sale or bundled like I did and it will be okay, but it is hard to recommend as a stand alone title.

Game Acquisition: Bundle Stars (bundle)
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 22 October 2017
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

Minimum:

OS: Win XP/7/8
Processor: 1GHz
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Graphics: OpenGL compatible
Storage: 50 MB available space