Dwerve PC Review

Before we even get into this properly, it is worth bringing up one essential thing about Dwerve: if you are bothered by it, you will not stop being bothered by it, and that thing is speed. You see, this game has an adorable little dwarven character who runs around a lovely, colorful world, and it’s all delightful except, of course, for the fact that he is incredibly slow. It was something I noticed immediately, and it never stopped being annoying. However, this is something that may not actually bother you. Still, I felt that it needed to be discussed first because if something as fundamental as the character’s basic movement bothers you, you may not want to play it.
 

 

The rest of this review will, however, not count that movement speed against the game as it is something that can’t exactly be fixed. So, what about the rest of the game? Well, at its core, Dwerve is a dungeon crawler, tower defense game with a cartoonish art style set in a rather standard fantasy world. Some elves, some dwarves, some trolls, some other random creatures that are suitably fantasy-oriented; it’s a cozy little world.

The game puts you in the shoes of Dwerve, who is obviously what Dwerve, the game now, not the character, is named after, but to avoid any confusion, I’ll call the game by its name, and Dwerve himself will just be called “the character”. That should clear up any confusion!

So, Dwerve gives you control of a character who is able to create a variety of towers that perform numerous offensive functions. There will be some that shoot arrows or other projectiles, some that act as floor-based traps that harm or slow enemies down, and some that swing melee weapons at enemies. However, unlike a traditional tower defense game, there is no central structure to defend, no base or castle. Instead, those towers are there to protect the character. This also means that the game is more mobile than many other tower defense games.
 

 

This is where the dungeon crawler aspect comes into play. Dwerve sees you through its world as it sends you on a linear plot after some bad guy trolls. There is some light exploration, with the rewards typically being coins, health potions, and armor (although the armor doesn’t appear to be all that helpful as you can get swamped by enemies very easily, but we’ll get to that soon enough). You wander through the world’s areas, doing small puzzles here and there (which generally take the shape of a switch- and lever-oriented gate-opening puzzles) and, of course, engaging in combat.

The combat works thusly. You enter an area where enemies spawn, sometimes, they are limited in number, and sometimes they have special spawning huts that allow them just to keep spawning more and more enemies (and so it could also be described as something of a swarm game). Then you engage with them by finding a nice area to keep yourself safe while laying down a whole load of towers that do your dirty work for you. The trick is to maintain a reasonable distance from enemies while constantly building new towers as old ones are destroyed. You use specific towers to deal with specific types of enemies. For instance, you don’t want to use the slow swinging axe tower against a swarm of twenty bats because while it does deal high damage, it can also only hit one enemy at a time. So, you slot out and use certain towers over others as you decide how to deal with various enemy types.
 

 

Here’s the kicker, though: you only get to use four tower types at a time. Like any tower defense game, the towers require certain resources to use (and in this case, the resource are special crystals that are restored whenever a tower is destroyed or dismantled). Still, on top of the resource management, you also only get a limited number of towers to use, and you have to go to a special workbench every time you want to swap them out. So, it’s all about the strategy of the situation, but you often don’t know which towers are best to use until you’ve faced off against the enemies in the next section and maybe died against them a few times to get the hang of them.

Dwerve is rather unforgiving at times. You can get absolutely swarmed with enemies who hack through your towers with gusto and then rush at you, and because you’re so slow, it’s hard to get away. A dash ability can help you evade enemies, but it has a ludicrously long recharge time. So it’s rendered effectively useless when it really needs to be useful. There is also a special ability your little character has that allows them to do an area-of-effect attack, but the recharge timer on that is even longer, so it should be used sparingly.  
 

 

However, one pretty cool thing is that your little character does have the ability to act like a castle and attack behind his towers. You have a ranged weapon that strikes enemies automatically when you standstill. This incentivizes you to hunker down, prepare your towers and help them from behind their safety walls. He doesn’t do much damage, but at least he’s helping out a little!

These towers can be upgraded, though. But there’s a problem with that too. Upgrades are quite expensive, and coins are pretty sparse, even if you do all the exploration on offer (and there isn’t much to explore). So, you always feel just a little like your towers are underpowered, but that could, of course, be my lack of tower defense skills. A game genre I have never been good at. Maybe you will find it more manageable!
 

 

But one thing you won’t find easier if this is something that bothers you is the technical issue of remapping. If you like remapping your controls to something more comfortable to play, you may be somewhat out of luck here. The game does not use a mouse, or at least it doesn’t need to, as you can play it entirely with a keyboard, and, sadly, you need to consider the main way of fighting is by using the four tower deployment buttons. Now, the game starts out with the directional keys moving the character and the WASD keys doing… nothing. The tower keys are not linked to them. So, you then switch them and make it that the WASD keys are for movement (which is relatively standard on PC) and then set the directional buttons to be the tower keys. Well… this then throws everything off because you can no longer change which key corresponds to which tower in the menu.

Let me explain. The upgrade menu also allows you to select which towers you want to assign to which button. However, suppose you have changed them to the directional buttons, which feels more intuitive. In that case, you will then enter the upgrade menu and discover that every time you push the directional button, which should change its functionality to a different tower instead of shifting the menu to whichever item is in the direction you pushed. So, it does not change the menu configuration in accordance with movement and instead with directional keys. It effectively makes it impossible to use the directional keys for tower placement because you can’t use the mouse or WASD keys to change which tower is assigned to which directional key. It is very probably a mistake, but it is something that stops you from customizing the controls to how you want to play.
 

 

Furthermore, exploration can be confusing at times since there’s no map, and because of the camera angle, you sometimes place towers where you don’t want to place them. This is probably why tower defense games tend to use a mouse for placement, but that is simply not the case here.

However, if you can get over those rather specific issues, then Dwerve certainly is a different take on the tower defense genre, and if you like tower defense, you could definitely do a lot worse!  And the game should keep you occupied for a good ten or so hours, but replayability may not be there just yet (although the devs have hinted at a new game plus mode further down the line). So, this may just be for you if you like tower defense. If not, then uh… maybe rather not.
 

Justin van Huyssteen
Editor, NoobFeed