Developer: Whale Rock Games
Publisher: Whale Rock Games
Platforms: PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
We Are The Dwarves – Review
We Are The Dwarves is a dwarven adventure that features real-time tactical gameplay of multiple characters in tight scenarios and hordes of enemies. You’re in charge of saving the dwarves from extinction by going on a risky rescue mission that could be your last. Take control of three dwarves and fight your way through the enemies in order to save your species!
Story
The Dwarven city is powered by huge Dwarven stars, but these are slowly dying out, threatening to make the Dwarves extinct. An expedition was launched to find a new stars in the depths of the Endless Stone, but things seem to be way harder than initially expected. Forcer, Smashfist and Shadow are all split from one another, and your first mission is to regroup and survive, then go look for a stone, if you still have the strength…
Overall, the story is pretty solid and has some nice cutscenes and dialogues that go with it. It also has a journal where you can read up on some lore of the game. While this is pretty nice, some text has typos in it though, even the first dialogue you see has a typo, which gives kind of a bad impression from the start…
Graphics
We Are The Dwarves’ graphics are actually really nice. Everything looks nicely detailed and it’s quite enjoyable to look at. It doesn’t have any weird colors and also has a wide variety of areas that you’ll go through, each with their own theme. The lighting is also very well done, providing just enough light to create a very dark and grim setting.
Sound
This is sadly where the bad news starts. The sound in We Are The Dwarves leaves a lot to be desired. While the music and atmospheric sounds are okay, the rest of the sounds aren’t that good. The sound effects don’t seem to always fire even though an action has taken place, and the voice acting is simply horrible beyond repair. It’s like one person did all of the voices in the game and tried to make a weirder voice than the previous one for every character. No voice acting at all would have probably been as good if not better than the voice acting there is now.
Gameplay
We Are The Dwarves is an all-out real-time tactical adventure where your goal is to simply survive and complete your quest to find a Dwarven star, which is harder than it sounds. The game features a set of customizable controls, but even though you can customize them, they’re pretty awful and clunky as hell. It doesn’t follow any of the mainstream control schemes so it will take some time to get used to (hold right click to rotate the camera for example). They also aren’t responsive and it’s very hard to actually attack things, since clicking on them is pretty hard at times for some reason. The actions you take also take an age to register and are in fact very hard to cancel, which makes it all the more frustrating.
The frustrations don’t stop there though, the camera is also pretty awful. The main frustration is because of the one addressed above, you have to drag your right mouse button in order to turn the camera. On top of that, the camera is always locked on one of your characters, which makes managing them harder if they’re spread apart. You also can’t zoom or pan the camera on top of that.
However, let’s talk about the actual gameplay. The game features quite a good tutorial overall, it introduces new elements in the game as you come across them and features tips on loading screens as well, helping out to survive in the harsh conditions. It teaches you the concepts about stealth: hearing, line of sight, angle of sight, …, as well as how to use your skills.
In total, you can play as three characters, each with their own unique skill set. Every character has five abilities it can use, four of which being normal abilities and one being an ultimate, only being available after it charges or the cooldown resets. This can make the game quite hectic when you’re playing with three characters at a time, so you can always use the pause function (it actually just greatly slows down the game) in order to help out.
The abilities and armor of each character can also be upgraded. There are a couple of pads spread around the levels which allow you to level up when briefly standing on them. You can then spend your resources you’ve found on repairs or passive upgrades, which can help out a lot since the game does have friendly fire! However, this menu tends to bug out from time to time and actually still keeps the game paused even though you left the menu.
We Are The Dwarves is also quite challenging, even on normal difficulty. It’s not just the challenge of the gameplay, but in combination with the clunky controls, you’re more likely to die because of your dwarves not responding that well than you are to actually dying from being bad at the game. However, the game does have a quick save option, which you pretty much have to spam and reload all of the time, a major immersion and fun killer…
Conclusion
All in all, We Are The Dwarves looked like a very promising game, but has too many shortcomings to get a very good review from us. While the game does feature quite a bit of challenge, has good graphics and an okay story, a lot of the challenge comes from the horrible control scheme. Typos, bad voice acting and bugs also contribute to the negative points, which will hopefully be fixed for people who play the game in the future.
We Are The Dwarves - Review,
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