A Game of Dwarves

I recently played through (and wrote a guide for) A Game of Dwarves released in 2012 by Zeal Game Studio, published by Paradox.

PC Download

The game is something of a builder/manager game: you control a settlement of dwarves and guide them in both mining out the area around their settlement and building the things they need to be happy and do well.

I really liked the potential of this game: I find it a fun thing to occupy myself with while watching TV or just winding down in the evening, and there is some challenge to it too — more than once I restarted a scenario to come at it from a better angle.

Overall, I'd say it's a decent enough game when it's available at a reasonable price.  Less than $10 is certainly OK, but around $7 might be more appropriate.

Why would I want to knock the price down further?  Well, the game certainly has its flaws.  For one, while there are Steam achievements for the game, some simply cannot be earned because some of the levels won't give you full credit for completing them.  (Paradox knows about this bug but has said that, with Zeal no longer in existence, no further development will be done.)

There are several other little problems that, while they are not game-breaking, can be annoying as well.

• Dwarves have problems climbing staircases, and sometimes repeatedly fall through them before navigating them successfully (this can be particularly annoying when they're starving and need to get up those stairs to eat).
• Pathing is generally pretty good, but, for some reason, when some dwarves are attacked, they just stand around instead of fleeing and you end up needing to move them manually or watching them die.
• If you happen, at some point, to spend all your money, no new wealth tally shows up when you get more (until you restart the game).
• There are a lot misspellings and grammar mistakes in the game text — anywhere from repeatedly misspelling "environment" to sentences that make no sense whatsoever and game missions being called different things depending on what piece of text is referring to them.
• I've had a lot of problems with camera angle.  Sometimes about midway into a level, it just decides the only view I want of the dwarves is at the level of their feet, and nothing I can do can get it to reset or take a better angle.  The only solution is waiting for it to get so bad that, when you load the game the game corrects it.
• Level design leaves a lot to be desired: sometimes the monsters right by you are level 10 or better, while the ones far away and deep underground are level 2.  It seems somewhat random.

I'll also say that, tone wise, I'd have preferred fewer puns and pop culture references (example: one resource is "dragonforce", with the tooltip, "the hardest metal") and dialogue that was worthwhile reading — instead, it pauses your game mostly to waste your time.  Some of that is, I think, poor translation work (or non-native English at the very least), and it tended to annoy me to some degree in that I generally expect a bit more polish from a game I've paid to play.

Hapy Dwarves Doing Happy Dwarf Things

Yet, all that aside, I really did enjoy the game itself.  That is, despite its slap-dash feel and poor finishing.

There are some DLC available for A Game of Dwarves, both add-on packs (Pets, Ale Pack, and Space Dwarves) plus some in-game purchases of furniture available.  I got a few of the in-game furniture packs, but they seemed a little overpriced (about $0.99 USD for three pieces of furniture on average).  

Overall: the game can be fun, and I can entertain myself for an unreasonable amount of time laying out settlements and making attractive rooms for my dwarves to enjoy.  Just know that the game is not really "finished" in a sense, and try not to pay full price for it.