The game advertises that it offers you choice and the ability to carve your own destiny out of it's crusty post-apocalyptic landscape. It also advertises itself as a wonderfully wrought tale. It lives up to neither claim. The writing is terrible. Perhaps if you've never opened a real book before and your only experience with story-telling has been Call of Duty and Halo you might find AoD's writing to be intriguing. However, Curious George trumps the dry, incapable pen of whatever monkey they got to write this steaming pile of garbage. The choice it offers is whether to hit the + button next to Strength or Persuade. No, don't touch the other! A successful character in AoD is very strictly relegated to doing one thing very well and nothing else. Difficult combat? Please. It's either impossible, if you chose to be persuasive, or it's simply dull, if you chose to be a scrapper. The dialogue choices during scenarios are incredibly limiting as well. There's no flexibility. In a world where everyone is trying to deceive you and take you for every penny you're worth, you, the player, aren't given the option to be deceitful. The writers obviously couldn't conceive of the possibility their players would want to keep their options open in a situation. I guess if I said I'd help this guy out I must accept the fact there's no option to back out of it, no matter how the situation changes during its course. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm throwing a tantrum because I couldn't make an intellectual, charismatic assassin who could play politics, which is all I really wanted to do in this trite, pointless waste of time.
The game is intriguing but ultimately leaves you wanting something... that respects you a little more. If you want to build an interesting dwarven burrow or mountain fortress with it you can... but it takes time. Lots of time. And while you can speed up the action (only up to 2x), the pacing requires that you babysit it. I marked a bunch of terrain to be dug up and trees to be chopped and just let it run for 2 hours at one point. I came back to find all my original dwarves dead, which wasn't a huge loss. They drop their gear and you can reclaim most of it. The AI is terrible at times. Mages try to run behind enemies, which means they're constantly dying because they run straight into enemy lines. The game doesn't match dwarves to tasks based on their abilities or gear. They just randomly start chopping or mining and sometimes you'll have your miner fishing in a corner while your lumberjack prospects for gold. The invasions are sometimes welcome. But... you can just wait them out. If you hide all of your dwarves away from your base there's essentially no danger to them. Once day comes, the invasion will disperse and you can go back to your business. The enemies will take out any obstructions between them and your stash, and they'll destroy any defenses like auto-turrets, but they won't do much else to wreck your place... so there's not a lot of reason to defend it. On the bright side, it's interesting to try out new defenses and build huge, complex bases. I enjoyed trying out new defenses to keep the invasions out and the game kept me playing until I beat the first level (which took 28 hours total).
