A Game of Dwarves

Great game!

It says I last played this game 9 years ago- huh?

The tutorial sucks. It cites things that are buried in menus. Instead of opening up options as you progress, like most tutorials, they just throw a bunch of stuff you don't need at the start and then want you to dig thru it all. Might as well just go to the first level.

The controls suck. How do i rotate anything? No clue. can't build anything how or where i want it because i have absolutely no clue how to rotate the object I'm trying to place. Even how it pauses things automatically when i go to play something., its just annoying that i need to mash the space bar to keep the game going when i'm just messing around trying to place stuff.

After spending an hour on it, i feel no desire to play it and feel I've progressed no where. Nothing about this game has hooked me or is unique in such a way for me to care to play it further. Given the age of the game, this one is getting thrown in the retired bin.

Overall, "A Game of Dwarves" is a wonderfully in-depth strategy game. If you like designing underground towns and being in a Dwarven fortress then this game is for you. The game has tons of replay value due to the size of the maps and the vast array of different objects you can build. Despite how complex it might all seem, it uses humor to keep things light and entertaining. There are occasions where the AI did some pretty odd things and sometimes the Dwarves needed that extra micromanagement push to get things done, but in the grand scheme of things, I had a blast. I believe it to be worth its current price tag of 9.99 and then some, especially if you're someone who got a lot of mileage out of games like "Dwarf Fortress" and "Dungeon Keeper." I've been waiting for a game like this ever since "Dungeons" lost its appeal, and I'm pleased to say that I wasn't disappointed. However, this isn't a game for those who are easily pulled away by strategy titles and lack the trait of patience. The game is short in length however the challenge and its overall difficulty could easily cost you atleast some days until you complete it.

I really enjoy the game. It can be a bit simple when you first start and don't really understand stuff but as you progress it gets a lot deeper, and not just because of the digging. Reading through the reviews I feel like a lot of people don't bother doing their own homework. Like buddy saying "Dead Game"... well yeah it's 11 years old as of this review. WTF did you expect?? Or the other guy saying the games not deep. Heck I've got 70hrs in and I'm still nowhere near the end and it's not due to procrastination, there's just a LOT to do.

I've never come across bugs in the game but it doesn't do a lot of explaining as to things, kind of feels very sandboxy.

A game of Dwarves was released back in 2012 and is an alright game with simple graphics and a simple, straight forward story line. The problems arise as you progress further into the game with a few unknown crashes, and the game play slow down with large projects with a decent pc. There are also glitches with replaying certain levels after obtaining certain perks and experience or tasks not being checked off. Its not a bad game, in my opinion it doesn't hold up current year and there are better Dwarf based games that have come out that will give you better game play and less performance issues.

Came back to play now that I've gotten a better grasp on the game genre, because I remembered feeling like it could be fun but I was out of my depth. It now crashes on the start of a new game. Joy. Guess I'll be uninstalling it again and just hide it from my games list.

Which is disappointing, it has that somewhat unique feel of a "retro that isn't really retro" feel I get from a lot of early 2010s games.

I like this game because it is an extremely chill building/digging game.
If you mass-produce wood and sell it to Hemfort you can start every game with an overwhelming advantage before you breach any enemy strongholds.

The prince abilities seem to be the only thing that could offer some replayability. The research works best checking it off left to right, top to bottom. No decision needed unless you want to rush or create some sort of personal challenge.

It reminds me a lot of Minecraft - except with more watching. =)

I don't know why I dedicated so much of my life to this game. More than the entirety of two days have been dedicated to this game. I'm going to give this a thumbs up, but only because of my severe stockholm syndrome rather than because I think anyone, anywhere, should ever get and/or play this game. Thank you for your time, I'm going to go into a corner now and think about my life.

This game is a classic! It reminds me a lot of how Dungeon Keeper 2 operated. Yeah the combat is a little wonky at times, there are some annoying bugs, and the dialogue leaves something to be desired, but I'm enjoying 100% of the time I've spent on it. The campaign is a lot of fun and to feel your dwarven colony's progress skyrocket at a point where you dominate the map is always joyous. Love this game!

Nobody tosses a Dwarf!
~Gimli, son of Glóin

Back in 1997, BULLFROG released Dungeon Keeper. Which, like many other BULLFROG games, ended up being one of the most essential titles from that time period. Naturally, a lot of people tried to repeat its success since then. But the funniest thing? Nobody ever succeeded. At least, not completely. Sure, the latest Dungeons entry wasn't that bad and made a lot of progress since the awful first game, while Evil Genius did totally fine with all its Austin Powers charisma. But all in all? Those were the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie. Not evil enough. No matter who tries, they just can't make a Dungeon Keeper clone at least nearly as good as the original. I call it... Keeper's Curse. And here comes another victim.

Like many other Dungeon Keeper clones, A Game of Dwarves comes with a pretty neat idea. Don't expect any story here, since it's just some lame attempts to be funny which feel like even less exciting version of Magicka (yes, turned out that it is possible), but gameplay-wise? There was an idea. And the idea was – in Dungeon Keeper players were able to explore the dungeons only horizontally. Won't it be fun to also allow players to dig up and down? You know, like in Diggles: the Myth of Fenris (people who played that one hearing the main theme in their heads in 3... 2........). Was it a good idea? Well, yeah! Totally! The problem is – that idea required some skill and experience. Something that small Swedish team didn't have. And it's not like they cared much. I mean, the guys released three different games that year and all of them sucked. There's a word for it. And the word is (surprise-surprise) “shovelware”.

But back to our dwarves. If you've ever played Dungeon Keeper, you can easily guess what happened here. The thing is – it's really hard to navigate in this game. It's hard to tell where you can dig and where you can't. And making a proper path for your minions? It's a royal pain in a hairy dwarven butt. Sure, the developers allowed us to build some bridges (which you can put right into the thin air because dwarves spit on them scientific laws!) to make our lives less miserable, but most of the time? You'll just suffer from trying to find your objective without making the dungeon completely unbearable. Sure, the good ol' Dungeon Keeper trick where you can just take your minions and move them from one place to another still works, but... yeah, you know how it is with the dwarves. Nobody toss them. And because of that very often the game... well... won't allow you doing it. Because magical traps and other elvish bull that will prevent you from placing dwarves anywhere near them. Your only way for you will be to dig a proper tunnel. And I guess we've already established that... it's a pain in the butt. In other words, navigation in this game? It's an ass. And not one of those cute little ones. But one... big... somebody, please, stop me.

Anyway, you've got the idea. A Game of Dwarves, while starting as a pretty common DK clone, ended up suffering from a very unpleasant controls / navigation system. Very often you'll want to stop playing it just because... it doesn't feel good, really. And it's not like there'll be a reason to keep playing either. The story gets abandoned somewhere in the middle (the game shows you “congratulations” cutscene just because developers didn't feel like making any more levels), the graphics is ugly as my ex-girlfriend's dead poodle after they've finally managed to extract the poor thing from vacuum cleaner and heck, there's no even proper voice acting. There's some DLC, though. Because yes, even when the game is as lame and ugly as this one, it still needs some DLC nowadays. You want to get access to all structures? You gotta pay [s]the troll toll[/s] more. Because why dwarves can't be like The SiMS (hint: because they bloody can't!)?

In conclusion, all I can say is that A Game of Dwarves is one of those “no-no” titles. One of those that not worth your time even if you can get it laughably cheap. Heck, you get this game for free? Just ignore it. Doesn't worth it. Like... at all. Even though, like everybody else out there, I totally love Dungeon Keeper (let's just admit it – it's good to be bad!), this game? It's just yet another shovelware you won't want on your account. Sure, it comes with an idea. But so what? You can't just go and sell the idea here, in Steam. And gameplay-wise? This game is a complete disaster. Dixi.

unfinished & bugged is all i can say. I'm big fan of sim games or any type of strategy and when i first saw this one i kinda get hyped, started the campaign and that was kinda fun, till game get laggy as hell. I think it bugged while i dug deeper and deeper (cuz i'm a good dwarf) and became unplayable, i even though if my display card burned or something. After i randomly get several game breaker bugs i decided to quit and wait for more patch & fix. Alas i think developers are abandon the game and expected fixes are never came.

This is a great, affordable game for anybody who loves base-building and the idea of running a little Dwarven colony. I'll admit, it's not the best looking game and is a little awkward to watch (the Dwarves/enemies often "slide" along surfaces, especially up and down ladders), however you get used to this and it actually is a little charming after a while.

The game has some pretty clever mechanics, where you have to continue to build Dwarven items and decorate your hold the deeper you delve, otherwise your Dwarves become unhappy. This keeps you pushing forward and gives you a reason to actually "conquer" and turn the mineshafts and caverns into actual Dwarven homes. Also, the game has a clever "question mark" system to encorage you to mine in different directions. The leveling and variety of your Dwarven warriors is also a cool way to add depth and variety to combat, plus naming each of your Dwarves gives you a connection to them and their exploits as your colony grows.

The story missions are quite extensive and become challenging, so there's plenty here to keep you busy for hours. Or you can just run wild with a custom game.

Overall, while this game isn't the most polished and could have more features, it's still an incredibly fun and fairly unique base-builder/dwelver game that has plenty of character and charm. It's definitely worth the current price, especially if you snag it on sale.

I'm not sure why there are so many negative reviews about this game. I think this game is absolutely adorable and quite fun. The mechanics take a little getting used to but I don't want a copy cat game - new mechanics are good. The story is silly and you get a chuckle once in a while. I wouldn't rank it up there as a MUST have game, but I still enjoy tossing the game on once in a while and building away. It's a very nice casual game.

Basically the young cousin of both Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft.

It was fun for a few hours, that's the best I can say for it. I much prefer the similar game "Dwarfs?!", which has worse graphics but crisper, balanced play.

You might enjoy this game if you just want to build something cute.

I bought this game on offer, thinking I was getting a good deal, but the save system is broken so I can't even continue with the campaign after I save and exit.

I didn't pay much, but I've still requested a refund, as it's the principle of the thing.

My advice is don't bother with this game. Even if it's in a sale, you'll still be buying a broken product.

This game tries to scratch the itch dungeon keeper and dwarf fortress have long since stopped scratching for me. (hundreds of game hours can only do so much.)

Unfortunately, where those other games are like a Velcro nose scratcher inside a spaceman's helmet, this is more of a damp sponge. You can try as hard as you want, it won't scratch.

I only managed to stick with this game due to the mild amusement of designing a very simple dwarf base, but that gets old FAST; it was pure stubbornness after the first 3 levels. You don't have the challenge and satisfaction of making something like in dungeon keeper or dwarf fortress, and it's not much fun aesthetically because the near non-existent challenge the game does provide wrecks your design.

The major problem with the game is how unfinished the final product is. The potential is definitely there, but it was rushed into final product for obvious financial reasons. Hence the cash grab DLC rushed quickly out.

The biggest clue to this being an unfinished mess is the falling animation. When your dwarves tunnel into a large cavern, or are falling for some reason, they panic, fall one Z level, stop in mid air, Panic again, Fall another Z level; rinse, repeat till the bottom. Come on guys, didn't have time to fully program that one?

The second clue is the half-hearted attempt at making your dwarves happy. You can decorate your entire dungeon with minerals you find, but this is purely aesthetic. Rough wooden walls and floors do the job just as well as Dragonite ore, the rarest mineral in the game. Come on devs, was the balancing too hard? Dwarf fortress had that coded!

If we are talking balancing, the teleporting mechanic breaks the game so hard it physically hurt me sometimes with boredom. You can teleport your dwarves anywhere on the map you have visited, as many times as you'd like, and as fast as you'd like. Sure they TRIED to nerf it by only letting you do one dwarf at a time, and by having special fields you need to send your dwarves to destroy, but you can work around them easily, usually by tricking the stupid AI.

If I send a dwarf tunneling into a unknown cavern, I should fear for his safety, or for the safety of my base, not watch bored with my hand on the teleport button to whisk him away from the slow moving enemies. (The combat AI is so bad they even take a second to spin and position in a North-south or West-East pattern before hitting each other.)
I never had any fear for my main base while playing the game. You can stop intrusion by deleting a ladder. Enemies try to circumvent this by randomly teleporting around, but half the time they stood there stupidly. Depressingly, I never had the chance to use all the nifty traps they game had available for me. By the time you can afford the traps you already have the appropriately levels fighters, making them useless.

I was REALLY angry at the half-coded ending to the game. Anti-climatic, with rushed animations; even the writing was half-hearted. Did they even expect anyone to get through the entire game?

There are more problems, Terrible AI, bad animations, ETC; but this game has taken enough of my time already.

I know some of you out there are desperate for easy to play games that scratch that itch I mentioned above, but don't come here. You will leave wanting, and with less money in your wallet.

I recently played through the campaign for A Game of Dwarves. I'm giving it a thumbs up, but a qualified one.

The Game

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.

The Problems

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 developer Zeal no longer in existence, no further development will be done.) So, for achievement hunters: you'll never be able to get 100% for this game.

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 your starting location are, say, 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 known to man") and dialogue that was worthwhile reading — instead, it frequently 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.

The Good

Yet, all that aside, I really did enjoy the game itself. That is, despite its slap-dash feel and poor finishing. The pacing is relaxed, and the graphics cute enough that you can spend time just enjoying digging around and making nice settlements.

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).

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.

The game is fun, However, I'm going to have to not recommend this game because of just one reason.

Hidden DLC's.

I based my choice to buy the game and the 3 steam DLC's on the total price and the expectation that would be all till new DLC's would come out some future day.
Only to find there were already about 10 more dlc's once you open the game and find an in-game shop.


Not to mention the ingame dlc store for the free items seems to be broken for several people, but that's another matter.

I bought that game with no expectations at all. And that's probably what helped me enjoying it. In the end, I did enjoy it. I even went up to the end, which kind of took me some time. Of course, it is full of downs/cons, like, it's a casual game, it's quite bugged, it has huge slow downs when the map becomes huge and full of your constructions, it is not very deeply thought and programmed, the scenario is poor, the dialogues useless, blablabla, you could make a huge list of the bad stuff, as there are probably more of these than the good ones. HOWEVER. However. All in all, there is one huge aspect of that game that is so nice that in the end it becomes heavier or at least as heavy as the bad stuff in the balance used to rank this game: the exploration feeling and the construction features. And you know what? These two simple facts, no matter how bad all the other things are, made me feel closer than ever to the golden past of games like Dungeon Keeper, more than any other game did these past 20 years. So, if you understood the whole situation here, yes: I DO recommend this game.

Now THAT is a fun little game! The graphics are not great, but hey you don't really care! It is similar to minecraft, but with far less complicated things that you can build.
You are a dwarf leader building an underground kingdom by digging down. The lower you go, the more valuable ressources you find. You got a nice campy campaign and the game is upbeat and a bit funny. You got a few different kind of dwarves that you can have and each has its own speciality.
The game is not hard, at least the first few campaign missions are pretty easy, but it needs constant digging and you can easily lose yourself for hours at a time.
In its simplicity, this game is deceptively addictive like crack cocaine if you can believe it! You look at the time, heh it just 19h00 so ill dig a few more blocks. Then when you look again, its 3h00 in the morning and god damn youre going to be dead tired for work tomorrow! argh!!!!!
And the game is cheap at 9$. It is well worth it in my opinion.

This is an absolutely fantastic little game. You're a Dwarf Prince, who is given control of a group of dwarves, and you build fortresses and caves underground and fight bad things who want to kill you. You go searching for materials to build furniture and decorations, and to advance your dwarven army. Once you kill the bad things, you can steal their beds and bunny rabbits and stuff to put in your fortress.

There is a campaign mode with quests which I think is really well done, and great to play. There's also a sandbox 'free' mode so you can build your ultimate fortress without any distractions. In both sandbox and campaign, I love being able to decorate my little dwarven fortress.. thing. There's a whole range of decorations and things to do, and discover.

Killing stuff and making a badass army isn't bad either, theres a fair few enemies and bosses to defeat with your military dwarves.

Theres a skill tree type doohickey that will allow you to give your group of dwarves more powers and items as the game goes on.

It's a great game to play casually and relax with (if you learn not to try and rush through, which made lead to stress and death unless you're quite focused!).

Sometimes your dwarves don't do quite what they're told, plus they're fat so they get stuck behind furniture a lot and then panic and die of starvation.. but it's okay, you can just spawn another one.

I definitely recommend it. It might take a tiny while to get used to (at least, it did me) but once you're there, it's quite addictive. One thing though - Apart from the DLC, there is an in game 'shop' to use your steam wallet to buy yet more decorations. The packs in there arnt expensive, and I think anyone who enjoys building/decorating/creating things like I do will be happy to pick them up for the price they are.. but if that sort of thing annoys you, well.. it's here.