Rimelands: The Hammer of Thor Demo

Role-playing games usually use a real-time combat system, although the option to pause the action at any time is there as well in most cases. Hence, a lot of tactics can be involved in the encounters, although the difficulty level must be scalable as well, otherwise all the effort is in vain. However, various other systems have been utilized over the years, some of which yielded good results in the end.

Rimelands: The Hammer of Thor may look like your average top-down RPG at a first glance, but there’s much more to it than that once the action starts to unfold. Hence, the greatest addition to the gameplay is the turn-based combat mechanics, which evolve very much like in what you may have seen in the Fallout franchise or various other such releases.

The universe in which the action takes place is a combination of fantasy and steampunk, which should be interesting to watch at least. Story-wise, you play the role of a treasure hunter as you keep scouring the land for riches and valuable items. Naturally, something goes wrong and you are forced to deal with slightly more pressing matters, as well as gruesome villains that send an entire army to kill you.

There are three different characters you can try out, depending on the type of player you are and how close to the action you want to be. Hence, the Assassin and the Shaman tend to use ranged weapons in combat, while the Barbarian likes to get really close to the action and use melee weapons to finish the job. Each one of them comes with a unique skill tree you can customize, depending on how you want to proceed.

From a technical point of view, the game sports pleasant graphics and quite the inspiring artwork, especially during the comic book-like cutscenes. The sound is also decent, but the soundtrack does not really impress as a whole. Thankfully, there’s enough action in the game to keep you distracted from these things, so that’s certainly a plus, even if things get a tad repetitive after a while.

In the end, it must be mentioned that Rimelands: The Hammer of Thor still feels like a cheap title, given the tedious and often encounters you have to deal with on a regular basis, with the same enemies. Hence, if you can get past this annoyance, then the title can prove to be quite nice.