The Case

A Game of Dwarves is a new release from Paradox, aiming to capture some of the magic of past management strategy games; in a title about Dwarves, goblins and evil Mages. This title takes a more hands off approach to management games, letting you build and vaguely guide your Dwarven minions, rather than directly control them, in a multi-layered, variable, isometric world, see how it fairs in my review.

The Trial

You play as the Dwarf Prince, the lazy and ineffectual son to the King of Dwarves. Between eating and sleeping, the King sees fit to instill some character building in the Prince, sending him out into the world to reclaim old Dwarven settlements and rebuild their Empire. Ah yes, their Empire. It was conquered and stolen by evil mages you see, who slaughtered the Dwarves and sent them to live on a tiny island as a fraction of their past success. Beyond a few scant lines of dialogue during missions, as well as the animated introduction sequence, this is about the only story you'll be getting playing A Game of Dwarves; the story is simply a means to keep ramping up missions and challenges.

This is a management game, think Dungeon Keeper or Theme Hospital (or any Bullfrog Productions game). You'll spend your time building your underground settlement, in various ways such as planting food, crafting furniture and placing decorations and traps. As well as this, you can also tell your Dwarves where to dig, which can lead to undiscovered rooms indicted by floating question marks. These usually contain monsters and treasure, so you'll have to make sure you have some Dwarf Warriors to back you up. There is a fairly long campaign, as well as custom map modes available. Although the custom map modes give you hardly any customisation.

The Dwarves themselves are divided into classes. You’ll usually be given a few classes at the start of a mission, or you can send for 'Dwarflings' from the home base, which you can then turn into any class. Once a Dwarf has its profession, they can't change. This often leads to situations where you have too many of one class and not enough military for example. The solution is to sell the Dwarves in order to gain the classes you need, it seems that is would have been beneficial to allow class switching, perhaps at a cost, but at least you're not rigidly tied to the Dwarves and classes you choose.

The crux of the game is this: you'll start a mission with your Dwarves and Prince (who mustn't die) and be ordered to find some sort of treasure and/or kill the enemies in the map. This involves digging, pausing for breath, digging and clicking. Digging grants you resources, such as gold or iron, which can then be used to craft better items in your base. You'll also be digging into the black, undiscovered void, to reach other rooms, indicated by the question marks, where you goal usually lies. I say usually, it takes time and a lot of digging to reach your end goal, as the map is scattered with side objectives to pursue.

That's the problem with this game really, despite the considerable amount of charm and personality in the Dwarves and how they are presented, the gameplay often devolves into a tedious amount of digging and repetition. You'll spend most of the game with the speed turned up, just to help skip the tedium of endless digging. I started to find that even in fast forward the game was still too slow. To say it takes awhile to get going is an understatement.

Due to the hands off gameplay, fighting is also just as bad. You'll find that your early warriors are easily overwhelmed by even just two goblins, and there are no tactics you can employ to influence a fight, they all just run around outside of your control. You can place traps sure, but these are costly to make and run, as well as taking an age to research. You'll be better off just getting lots of soldier Dwarves.

Graphically, it is cartoony, but ultimately forgettable. It's not stylised enough to be unique, nor is it realistic enough to be impressive. It's middle of the road stuff. Sound wise the effects are a good standard, although more Dwarven voices and dialogue would have been nice. The music is fitting as well, suiting the underground setting, but it doesn’t exactly stand out.

The Verdict

It's all rather a shame really, as A Game of Dwarves had the potential to be immense fun. I love management games and so was rather keen to see how this one faired, sadly I was left disappointed. Every level involves digging deeper and finding something but that takes forever. The array of items and options available to you is also lacking. In short, the management is not as deep as it could be and the game itself, despite oozing charm, just becomes anything but fun to play after a few hours.

It's accessible, sure, there are no statistics screens or in-depth information panels. Just you, some hairy Dwarves and underground caverns. It's a far cry from the management style games which inspired it, ending up being just mediocre in the process.

Case Review