The info you need is all in the game, it's just that it leaves a lot of it hidden in sub-menus and tooltips while insisting on dragging us through the usual 'here's how to move the camera' rigmarole. No hard feelings though: the game is a different, and much more enjoyable animal once this stuff is fully understood, but you might not go into as blind as I did. I ended up restarting after a few hours as, until the penny fully dropped, I'd generally wound up murdering people on the road outside my scattered-to-the-far-winds house, and then having to spend most of my time manually ordering my creatures to mop up all the blood, in order that the next crop of fools didn't run away immediately. It also does a poor job of explaining some of its most essential concepts, specifically that you need the front section of your base to act as a cabin-in-the-woods-style honeypot trap for victims, while you keep all the monster-specific stuff like butchery rooms and sinister laboratories hidden a few rooms deep, behind the scenes. My five-year-old daughter has a superior grasp of left and right than does MachiaVillain's laboured mouse button-switching. MachiaVillain makes a poor first impression, what with its glaringly poor English translation, tired mwah-ha-ha humour and an interface that has less consistency than a monkey using a typewriter on a bouncy castle. Sloppy base design, gaps in construction and generally throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks is a fast track to hungry, insubordinate ghouls and escaped human prey sounding the alarm. It puts me a little more in mind of Prison Architect, which is to say it's more to do with stage-managing the daily routines of your inmates/minions than it is raising vast armies with which to unleash hell. It runs much further with its inverted horror movie concept than does the usual "ooh, what if you were the bad guy, eh?" tomfoolery, though witless humour and a needlessly fiddly user interface get in the way of the gruesome good times.īullfrog's classic game of monster management Dungeon Keeper is the unavoidable inspiration, but to its great credit, MachiaVillain doesn't walk the same building sim/real-time strategy paths as quasi-DK successors Dungeons and War For The Overworld. You shepherd a small herd of flesh-eating monsters around, building both an ever-growing lair for themselves and a faux-home to lure in unsuspecting humies with which to feed your festering menagerie. Shamelessly in the tradition of Dungeon Keeper (still my go-to PC gaming nostalgia, along with X-COM), MachiaVillain is a management sim in which the baddies are the goodies. Too much visible viscera will scare off the next crop of guileless victims to your hand-crafted house of horrors, y'see. MachiaVillain is primarily a game about remembering to sweep severed heads off your porch.
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