L.G.C. |Reviews| — The Dwarves

Your intrepid heroes read walls of text, scream about controls, and suffer D&D flashbacks. The Dwarves face the CHAIRQUISITION!

Game: The Dwarves
Webzone: store.steampowered.com
Devel: KING Art
Engine: Unity
Price: 39.99 / CDN 49.99

Wazzat: Based on the eponymous bestselling novel by Markus Heitz, The Dwarves is a fantasy role-playing game with a strong story and tactically challenging real-time battles.

Mandatory Disclosure: They sent us keys

CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope

– Not sure if want

– Check it out

– Shutupandtakemymonies

Makes with the working

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Atl+Tab while in-game is unpossible.
Hovers between 50/90.

J-

Add another to the list of unity games you can’t play at UHD.

P-

I will never cease to be surprised to see a Unity game running constantly in the high 80 FerPS.
Especially one which looks as good as this one, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Shiny / Sounds

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If you look at the Kickstarter pre-alpha trailer it looks… well, it looks exactly the same as the finished game.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing but makes one wonder where that $310,091 went.
The graphics look spot on for a title released in 2006.
Again, nothing bad but don’t expect to be blown away.
The animation rigging and cutscenes are a bit of alright and the voice work is surprisingly passable.
- Just as an aside, the Dutch narrator is hella better.
However, it’s all for naught since so much of the game is spent navigating the stupid monkey overworld map.

J-

Hansi, I will always love you and will forever want to have your man babies, but that credits song is garbage!
- Did you literally have a list of bullet points of stuff about the dwarves and just ad libbed some lyrics?
The game has a weird tendency to switch between in engine cutscenes and rendered ones. It’s pretty jarring at times
The cinematic stuff looks about as good as Total Warhammer, which is less of a complement of this game and more a dig at Total Warhammer.
The voice acting is Okay.

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There’s some flickering in the UI. I don’t think it was there at first, it just started happening at one point.
It happens in both MATE and KDE regardless of compositor.
It doesn’t really cause anything to break it’s just very unaesthetic.
Speaking of aesthetics, this is a good looking game!
They went for heavily stylized characters but compensated for that some by having very realistic looking textures, for both characters/clothing and the tiny bits of the world you see up close.
It’s a shame most of the game happens in text form and you do most of the exploration from the world map, because this is all very good looking!
And good sounding!
As Jordan mentioned, the lyrics aren’t very good, thankfully they’re mostly absent through the game.
The background music which accompanies most of the action scenes and the eerie, soft music when you’re exploring a creepy place are really well done.
Bonus points for awesome voice acting as well.

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Control

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Bog standard RTS controls.
They “work” but if you don’t have rebindable controls in 2017 automatic 2 Chairs.
Oh, I guess you can use a controlla but seriously, who hates themselves that much?

J-

At first I wasn’t sure if I liked the whole hybrid turn based/rts mode
After 3 hours, I’m pretty sure I hate it
The way battles go, you get moved around so much in such random directions that whatever directives you give are invalid the second you unpause
It looks visually interesting, and really captures the cinematic dwarf fights of the hobbit, but it’s a pain in the butt to control
The overworld is a conventional hex crawl. That I have less problem with. It’s done competently enough.

P-

You may remember that other game about dwarves we covered a while back.
This game is what would have come out of We Are The Dwarves, if the devs had taken what we said to heart and fixed the game instead of doing nothing at all.
The combat in The Dwarves manages to be tactical and still feel very impactful, or meaty as some people often say.
If one of the dwarves does a special attack you’ll see the enemies get squished and blood spray everywhere, or there’ll be a bunch of ragdolled orc bodies flying all over the place… it’s awesome!
The controls themselves are mouse driven with shortcuts for the special attacks.
I’d like an option to remap those hotkeys though, it’s the one thing keeping The Dwarves from getting four appropriately sized chairs for Controls.

Total-

FUN

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The Dwarves opens with a nice sized battle that’s borderline enjoyable.
Then it’s just you on a quest to bring a bag from point A to point B.
Oh fkn look! The overworld map is going to be a THING! \:D/
Seriously, that gives me D&D flashbacks and i’ve never played D&D
…mainly because having my adventure read out puts me right the fk to sleep.
Sorry, not sorry, I noped right there.
I really wish this was a hack-n-slash and not a Real-time /w pause.
Did I mention the Pause? Because this game sure as FK does.
Kinda defeats the whole point of real time, doesn’t it?
Choose your own adventure the game.
Averages 8 hours of gameplay.
$39.99
What’s not to love, Brad?

J-

I’ve decided to make my dwarf dude a self hating dwarf
This is one of those games where it does a bunch of stuff right, but the core mechanic isn’t, and that hamstrings the game
The combat just doesn’t work IMO, and that’s where most of the gameplay is
Occasionally, you’ll have a section where you need to solve a puzzle, investigate something or just wander around the world, but the majority of your time and effort is going to be spent on fighting
And with it’s really poorly explained and very likely poorly implemented system, you’re not going to be having too much fun
The game can’t’ decide if it wants to be an RPG, moba or hack and slasher, and it’ll try to drag you in all 3 directions until you get tired.
It would have worked better if they just picked one and stuck with it.

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I liked it.
If I had to find something to rag on it, and I kinda do since that seems to be the only reason some people stick around for my bit in the Fun segment, it’s the extreme adherence to the “Tell, don’t show” school of game design.
I’ve talked about this before, I’m sure, but as a refresher, in broad strokes there are two kinds of video game narratives:
- Narratives which integrate into the gameplay and keep the word count down to a minimum and are still able to advance the story, or the “Show, don’t tell” approach. A good example of this kind of game would be Half-Life 2;
- And then you have the “Tell, Don’t Show” approach where the narrative is told to you and the gameplay is something which is completely unrelated to it.
Don’t believe me? You could replace the entire story in The Dwarves with a “coming of age” narrative where a young dwarven stud who had a very sheltered upbringing, going out into the world and befriending two other dwarven hunky boys, joining them in their quest to broaden their sexual horizons.
Given how much of the non-combat narrative action happens solely in text form, the gameplay, which in this game is mostly just combat, and the narrative are absolutely disjointed.
That said, even though they’re completely independent, both the story and the combat are very good.
And I like that! I will excuse this Ludonarrative “Discordance” for the simple fact that, in their own way they’re well done, even if the only thing keeping them together in The Dwarves is completely superficial.

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Final –