We are the Dwarves

To call this game frustrating is putting it lightly. You're incredibly weak; avoiding and sneaking past enemies is often the best course of action. Except this isn't a stealth game, and the twin axe wielding brute named Smashfist can't sneak. It's a stealth game with no stealth mechanics. The game is hard and I died a lot, but rarely did I feel like it was a result of my actions. The game is good at letting you know how you should do something but doesn't give you the tools to do it. Sneak by some cocoons so that they don't wake up? Sure I can do it that, except you can't sneak and there's only one path by the cocoons. The camera is often blocked by scenery and half the time you can't tell what is going on. Bad combat is made worse by the fact that you can't even see what you're fighting. The voice acting is atrocious. The fact that English clearly isn't there first language is absolutely fine and I'm not going to fault them for that but I honestly would have preferred them to record the game in their native language and done English subtitles instead. The writing is broken, the delivery is bad, and the voices seem forced and fake and just take you out of the experience. The visuals are decent, it's not the worst but it really doesn't look as good as a 2016 game should. And is there even music in the game? If there is, it's incredibly forgettable as I couldn't even tell you what it sounds like. The design of the world, enemies and characters is very good and really help make you feel like you're in a vast unexplored subterranean world. The lore itself if pretty cool and I would recommend watching the intro online as it's fairly unique. But I can't recommend you buy this game, especially for the asking price of $24.99 at the time of this review. Not to mention that it's $14.99 permanently on Steam. Even at the 91% off I bought it for I couldn't recommend it unfortunately. The heart was clearly there, but heart alone doesn't make a good video game.

TL:DR: it's one of those games that you feel more releived to finish rather than satisfied. I bought this game persuaded by its nice artwork, interesting premise and being one of the few video games that's actually about dwarves. But for a game that promises to be dwarfy, it comes off as more elfy and not even the cool ones. It's flimsy, the gameplay doesn't play honestly and while well thought out completely fails deliver any of it thourougly. To begin with the voice acting is just awful. Slurred ukrainian voices trying to delive stilted lines in a language they obviously don't speak regularily. The combat mechanics seem to have some form of thought and intent behind them, with it speaking of high intelect tactics and control of the battlefield but as you go trough it really just becomes a ball of dota 2 eurojank rippoff, with a focus entirely on stealth even for a character weilding two axes and called a "berserker". I found most of the time just standing near the healing orbs and just mashing at enemies I cleared rooms faster than any attempt at planning to sneak around or using the characters skills to their fullest around enemies. Other times it was straight up not true what the game told you and what the game did. In the entire game you're stuck in this perpetual swampland/platou mix that while pretty as a single setpiece 13 hours of dwarves trudging trough brown water while getting pelted by the same bug/fishperson/one legged rabbit mix is innane. And the worst of it all? It ends on a cliffhanger. And not even a good one. You almost expect there to be a we are the dwarves 2 from it but the devs literally aren't working on a followup. Wich is a shame because you can clearly see something more was what the devs wanted to make, something with more exploration and interactivity rears it's misfigured head every now and then but is quickly burried under being a quick and easy chopjob of dota 2: adventure mode.

The Good : The game does run smoothly. Video setup / config works. Graphics are strange but complete. Interesting story. The Bad : Camera viewpoint is locked. Terrain features DO frequently block the view. Some of the resources ( stones / crystals ) you need to collect, can't be found. Playing styles, different than what was developer intended, can get you "stuck" on several of the boards.

...theres a reason this is on sale for so cheap, a badly implemented UI, with missions that you have no idea to do because you have no idea how to use the UI save for random clicking, couldn't even rescue the second character as he is unable to reach long range firing enemies before dying and who know where those resources are hidden that you're supposed to find before you get picked off.... might be worth playing if only someone could explain how each mission was supposed to be completed without random guessing...

Umm, look, missteps here are aplenty, way more than a short review can fit in. The baseline of my impressions — We Are the Dwarves may be a functioning product, but it's not a finished game. Every aspect here needs varying degrees of work: core mechanics and UI are a couple of prototyping/itirating cycles away from gelling together, QA-wise it looks like a few months of polish to go, and in terms of content it's all over the place with relatively huge setpieces quickly discarded while some environments get recycled from start to an abrupt ending. It never feels that the devs found their footing with the overall design, so it thrashes between a mostly by-the-numbers ability-based action, a few one-note gimmicks and a clunky real-time squad tactics. I've enjoyed its aesthetics and some of its gameplay quirks, but rather in spite of its more glaring, ever-present flaws. Can't say the latter won't outweigh the rest for everyone else.