A Game of Dwarves

Dwarves. They've always served as a bit of comic relief in fantasy. They're short. They love a drink. And they somehow always end up digging too deep (can be funny). Naturally a light-hearted Dungeon Keeper-styled simulation is a perfect fit for dwarves.

A Game of Dwarves lets you build and shape a settlement, evolve its members, dig deep to defeat bosses (evil mages and the likes), and find treasures and resources. It's a proven and highly addictive formula as it provides both exploration, plenty of rewards and room for creativity.

There is a certain old school charm about A Game of Dwarves. The animations are few and stiff, the grunted remarks from starving dwarves or panicking dwarves grow repetitive within the hour, but somehow it all harkens to the origins of the genre. It feels as though I'm playing a slightly prettier version of a management game from the late 90's. However, there are areas where I feel the developers could have made more of an effort to modernise the game, specifically when it comes to menus and interface.

There are two main modes to explore, the campaign with specific missions to complete and a freeform sandbox mode. While the campaign isn't overly long it still provides you with plenty to do as each dig site typically requires more than an hour of your time. You can speed up and slow down the flow of the game, but if you want to be able to react to threats that arise you're probably going to play it at standard pace for a large portion of the session.

You start each mission in the campaign with a basic settlement made up of some diggers, a researcher (lets you climb the tech tree), a crafter (builds furniture, storage, etc.), a guard or two, and a worker (tends your crops of food and wood) - and from there the only way is down. Some missions are structured in a way so you have to find specific rooms in order to progress, while others are a little more open-ended in nature, but as a rule you have to dig down deep, grow a sizeable army to take on any threats you unearth, and build new mini-settlements along the way so your dwarves don't go without food or sleep (or they'll die on you).

It's not a terrible loss to lose a dwarf, even if losing a levelled up digger is a bit annoying as they take a while to train. Your new dwarves, or dwarflings, spawn from a spawning pool (there are no dwarven women here so it's only natural), and you then assign them with a job. The dwarfling will quickly gain experience if left alone so if you want to replace a high level digger who dug too deep and died, then you may want to leave that dwarfling on his own for a bit and he'll be more useful once you assign him with digging duties. He'll also level up digging, so it's a toss up how you decide to bring up your dwarven. As for military dwarves it's a good idea to let them mature as dwarflings, giving them a little more health before they start bashing greenskins.

That takes us to combat. As with everything else in A Game of Dwarves it uses in-direct controls. You can build traps to aid your army, more on this later. Path finding is a bit strange at times, and it can be hard to monitor your progress as the fights tend to involve a lot of dwarves standing on the same tile (especially in the beginning when haven't upgraded some to be ranged units).

There is no persistence as far as your band of dwarves goes between missions, but you do level up your prince (i.e. dungeon keeper) with the experience you gain with each completed objective. I chose to progress my prince down the warrior's path, meaning he's able to help his military dwarves against various enemies - this is very useful early on as the prince is rather powerful and easily does away with lesser enemies. It can be frustrating though, as he sometimes takes his military ambitions too far and ends up dying as he engages in melee combat.

There are plenty of different resources to unearth, gold, silver, platinum, titanium, iron, rock, marble, and so on. Every block can hide a valuable resource and that's part of the addictive nature of the game. There are tons of objects to craft, most of them useful in some way or another.

I've touched upon some of the problems with A Game of Dwarves, some slight oversights when it comes to interface and user friendliness. It could also have done with a few more animations. I'm also a bit disappointed in how you manage and set up traps - as you need rather rare resources to build traps and generators to power them, it's not really an option to build a strong defense and scale down on your military. I would have loved to have been able to play the game a bit more defensively, now traps are mainly just a little diversion rather than a solid piece of the gameplay.

I also had an issue with the way guard posts work in the game - for instance your military won't train on dummies if they're assigned to a guard post - and if this is your way of advancing your army down towards the bottom of the level it's a slight frustration. When you learn how to build a camp with food, beds and dummies later on you only have to disable the guard post and they'll stay there, train, eat and sleep. I also encountered some technical issues during my time with the game, even if it's stabile for the most part in its current state.

Managing the needs of your dwarves is your main task and happiness is definitely the most difficult one to keep on top of. Your dwarves won't die if they're unhappy, but spending some of your resources on decorations will mean happier dwarves - and happy dwarves work harder. At least I think that's the principle in play here.

At the end of the day A Game of Dwarves had me playing until 3am and even if there is a lot to nitpick about, there is a good foundation here. It may come across as a game made from ye olde days, and it may come up a little short in terms of polish, but with an affordable price tag (£7.99) it is good value for fans of old school management games.