The Dwarves

I was super excited about this game. Perhaps I expected too much being a huge fan of the book series. The game itself feels incomplete. It's very short and very repetetive gameplay was boring quickly. Only a few fun characters to play with, didn't feel it was very balanced in that sense. I feel like there would be a sequel based on War of the Dwarves, but I kinda would feel skeptical about buying it.

I finished it to the end on hard difficulty. - Very linear story. Like you are driving on the train (none of your choices will change this computer movie). No armor, no weapon. Battles are very primitive (one/two skills are usable). Camera suxx. Very dissapointed. + Good picture, different heroes. Linear STORY TALE about dwarves :(

The Dwarves very much feels like a prototype of a game, that should be made. Fans of the Die Zwerge novels will be pleased by the fact, that game captures the first book pretty well, although it omits almost all parts where Tungdil is not present (ei.: the events surrounding Council of Magi and motivation of the antagonist). The gameplay is promising but unrefined (the "ice- hockey" feel of the battles really grinded my gears), the visual design is nice but sometimes it lefts you struggling to make out where is what, the music is adequate and the camera controls are your worst enemy. The story deserved more time to be told and those, who did not read the books will maybe wonder why are certain events happening. And there are bugs, of course. Overall, the game sold itself to me mostly on promise of future potential. I am looking forward to the sequel and maybe even more to the massive patch or DLC, that will fix the above mentioned problems.

TLDR: Honestly, the Dwarfs book series deserves better. The game is mediocore, the gameplay kind of dull. The combat clunky and the camera wierd. All the animations seem off and the voice acting... oh god. In a game so driven by the story, you would actualy expect better voice acting and cutscenes than this. The soundtrack is nice, but there is not a lot of tracks. So you hear it all in a while and then it gets dull. The game is not really bad, 3 stars suit it fine. Not a great game, not a masterpiece, but it is playable and you can get enough fun out of it to justify buying it discounted. I think it lacks final polish... A few more months of development and it could have been much better. Oh... and maybe better voiceactors. Some more info: Lets break it down a little. Into categories I think could use with adressing. The story: If you have read the books, its the same story. There are slight changes here and then and you experience all of it just as Tungdil, so you never see what happens in Porista, you never see different things that happened to other characters in the books. Weather that is better or worse is for you to decide, it did freshen up the story and makes you understand Tungdil a little bit more. Voiceacting: Its just dull. Not enough emotion in their voices, sometimes too much emotion. Alfs sound like Sauron on helium and any conversation with them just sounds really stupid because of that. Combat: Combat is real time with pause elements. I think the game would actualy be better if the combat was turned base. They tried to go for the Dragon Age combat but failed to make it as engaging. It feels clunky and you often kill your own heroes by accident, as friendly fire is very much a thing and even stupidly so. I would think Boendal could actualy hit a target in front of him... not an ally to a side. There are some cool abilities, but most are just standard "do more damage" "Damage a cone" "Knock an enemy down". The game is about 6/10.

The game is mostly a real time with pause strategy game which sends you from mission to mission. The great part is that every mission is embedded in the story and there are no fillers. If you like a tight story without any open world collection crap and RTWP gameplay, get this game!