The Dwarves PC Review

I haven’t always liked dwarves. When I first saw the Lord of the Rings, I hopped on the elven train, like many others. However, in time, I have grown to appreciate the bearded warriors that live under the mountain, playing as them in a good number of RPGs. Naturally, when hearing about The Dwarves nearing release date, I wanted to see what it had to offer in terms of a high-fantasy adventure, even if I was not familiar with Markus Heitz’s writings. The Dwarves puts you in the shoes of Tungdil, a dwarf raised away from the dwarven kingdoms, by Lot-Ionan, one of the Magi tasked with protecting the realm of Girdlegard. As Tungdil, you will set off on an adventure that requires exploration, wit and combat prowess, all of which you’ll do alongside a handful of companions. It’s pretty much a standard scenario, in terms of fantasy titles, however some parts are held together much better than others.

The world map is large enough. It comes with nodes, representing locations, which may trigger text encounters, exploration segments or fights. There are a handful of side-quests, which don’t go too far from typical fantasy scenarios: a village in need of help here, a pack of bandits there, however, they are voiced and written in a manner that does draw interest towards them. The rewards you’ll obtain from doing them will be fairly standard items, perhaps some supplies or something to sell to a merchant for a bit of gold. You can choose to handle situations differently, however, the choices don’t have a great impact on anything aside from the side-quest in question. You’ll undoubtedly tread familiar ground; however, some characters are built up really nicely. The story itself is helped a lot by the great voice acting, soundtrack and cutscenes.

The story touches on many fantasy clichés, so, originality is not its strong suit. That being said, for the most part, it remains familiar but enjoyable. There’s this sense of optimism, sprinkled with a bit of naivety about the main character that felt refreshing to me.  The two dwarves, Boindil and Boendal, have good chemistry going between them, showcasing the major traits of dwarves. However, being only 8-10 hours long, many characters don’t get much said about them. Perhaps there’s more on them in the books, but those who, like me, choose to play without having read the series will be left with enough questions. The last act also feels a bit rushed, compared to the other two. After a short while on the world map, you get thrown into a series of scenarios that feel like you’re fast-forwarding through everything. The story also suffers from a rather unimpressive villain that is introduced quite nicely, only to disappear until the last scenario, where he’s, supposedly, really strong, yet doesn’t really show it in any way whatsoever.

The combat system in The Dwarves is more action oriented. Your characters gain Action Points as they kill enemies. Sometimes, having a good approval rating from other characters may also give them AP, however, that system isn’t very well fleshed out. You need AP in order to use your skills and that’s about it. You mostly want to put your back against a wall to minimize damage. Alternatively, you can just pull injured chars back, leading to dead times in combat scenarios.

Instead of requiring tactical management of troops, everything quickly becomes a disorganized mess, most of the time. On top of that, The Dwarves’ friendly fire and floaty physics, make it so that you don’t feel very much in control. I’ve had one dwarf kill off another just before ending a scenario because they use their ability when you order them to, regardless of whether their target is or is not near them. This often leads to having to click a centimeter to the right, just so that your seasoned dwarf warrior will actually land a hit. You can’t save during these scenarios and, despite them being short, little missteps like these can quickly devolve into repeating it many times. While, seeing tens of orcs flying from one single cleave or having two characters rip an enemy to shreds in quick succesion is awesome, this is but a part of the combat The Dwarves offers. The rest quickly becomes a chore that sucks all the greatness out of the battles.

You can take up to four characters into battle, each of which can equip one item. There is a decent selection of skills, more becoming available upon leveling up, which allows you to choose one of two mutually exclusive skills for each character. You can only have three active skills, which does allow for some experimentation. The items, on the other hand, are either potions or provide generic passive bonuses. The Dwarves’ combat scenarios are, by far, the place where the game suffers the most. The difficulty tends to be all over the place. Some mid-game scenarios requiring several restarts before beating them, while others, especially bossfights, can be done in mere seconds on medium difficulty. There are a couple of strange design choices, like applying friendly fire to your troops, but not to the enemy’s. When dealing with several packs of archers, you’re basically on a timer to rush and dispose of them as they’ll hit a dwarf standing in a sea of orcs with pinpoint precision. There would be nothing wrong with that, were it not for the large amounts of damage your characters take and which cannot be mitigated all that well. Other scenarios will require you kill one enemy, often times, important for the story. In every case, all I had to do was ignore every other enemy that swarmed me (and there were always orcs around) and unleash every skill (particularly Boindil’s flurry) on them, leading to a 10 second boss fight. When dealing with a pack of underlings takes longer than defeating the main antagonists, the story loses some balance.

The most enjoyable missions are the straightforward “kill x enemies” ones. By far the biggest pain in the backside were the “get to the exit” missions as, having one hero die, meant having to restart. On most occasions, I was also successful by simply pushing into, and eventually through, enemies, with the occasional fear or cleave to pave the way. I’d get to the end of the level, and push the pack near the exit out of the area, only to win. I would have no issue with this if the game wouldn’t make it clear that it “wants” you to fight the orks. If that weren’t so infuriating at times, perhaps I would have considered it. Then again, no matter how stubborn dwarves can be, having them walk through a large orc camp while ignoring most of the orcs wanting to kill them is ludicrous. I should also mention that the immersion is also broken when a hundred orcs magically die after you’ve slain the NPC the objective requires you to slay.

The good bits in the game are constantly shadowed by the less-than-good parts. I really loved the cutscenes, the voice acting and even the majority of the writing. The story, although cliché, I enjoyed. You’ve seen it before, but it was clearly handled, for the most part, with much care and attention. However, the gameplay will be unpardonably messy for some, while others will be able to get through it with some effort. It’s a situation where the 8-10 hour campaign is too short for the story to cover everything it should, yet long enough for what’s on offer in the gameplay department. What isn’t justified, however, is the 40 euros price tag, given how there’s not that many reasons to replay the campaign once it’s done. Fans of the books may feel differently about The Dwarves, however, to those approaching the universe for the first time through this title, some caution is recommended.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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