Dwarfs!?' offers an addictive, fast paced arcade-like experience, with plenty of difficulties and game modes to play around in.
As the new overseer for your underground Dwarf base, your job is to manage the small colony and make it as rich as possible, before they meet their inevitable doom! To survive as long as possible, you’ll have to steer and guide your greedy little fellows to the richest points in the caves, while avoiding all the dangers – so they don’t end up destroying your Town Hall and its essential supply of beer.
They explore for you, they mine for you and they fight for you - but if you don't keep an eye on them, they'll do what they do best: die for you and take everyone else with them. But, if all else fails when the Spider Queen comes for you – use the Outpost’s Dwarf Cannon and shoot Dwarfs at her.
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The life of a dwarf is tough. Born into the depths of the Earth, you're soon sent on a search for precious ore, digging further and further from your home. If you're lucky, you'll strike gold, and shower your town in riches. If not... you'll shower it in less friendly things, like monsters and giant spiders, or flood it with water or lava from an underground stream you accidentally break into. In those events, not only are you sure to perish, but lest your peers act fast, all of them will, too.
Such is the premise of Dwarfs!?, a management game that has you looking after dwarves mining for treasure. The game begins at an underground town placed at the center of a map, from where, one by one, dwarves come out and look for a cave wall to dig into. You can give direct orders to each dwarf, but once those are exhausted, they'll just go their own way and dig wherever they want. And sometimes, they'll find more than they bargained for.
Should your dwarves dig into a monster den, those are set loose and you must quickly deploy and move in soldiers to deal with the threat. Tunnels flooded by lava or water must be responded to even more quickly by sending another dwarf to collapse them with explosives. There's an escalating peril that confers an arcade-y quality to Dwarfs!?: the further you progress, the more dwarves there are and the farther away from home they'll be, so there's a growing chance that one of them will cause a disaster that finally costs you the map -- your goal is to score as high as possible before that happens.
It's a surprisingly fun casual game that had me engaged for a couple dozen hours. It comes with several modes, and while my favorite is the default, F2P one, which gives you a time limit (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) to explore the cave as far as you can and maximize your score, I never regretted getting the paid version of the game, as it proved to be great value anyway.
...it could have done without the obnoxious voice acting, though.
Copied and pasted from my Dwarfs F2P review because they're the same game:
I initially had to try this game because Killing Floor had kind of a collab? with it where it would unlock a warhammer for the former if you played this.
And then I just said 'fuck it' and went for the completion because why not.
And then I just said 'fuck it' and went for the completion because why not.
Easy and normal modes are chill. You can probably reach the end with not much difficulty and you will be greeted to a clear map with tons of dwarfs.
Now, insane mode... It's a tickling clock, mostly. Prices to seal off water and lava hazards increase linearly with every block placed, and it's genuinely not reasonable to actually seal them off, so you just put a wall on front of them and hope that your dwarfs don't go around (which they will, so you need to have peak reflexes to deal with it).
Eventually I just had a main group of warriors to deal with the bosses because I can't be managing them on top of the enviromental hazards... but still, it would be just a matter of time until the water/lava becomes unstoppable.
Now, insane mode... It's a tickling clock, mostly. Prices to seal off water and lava hazards increase linearly with every block placed, and it's genuinely not reasonable to actually seal them off, so you just put a wall on front of them and hope that your dwarfs don't go around (which they will, so you need to have peak reflexes to deal with it).
Eventually I just had a main group of warriors to deal with the bosses because I can't be managing them on top of the enviromental hazards... but still, it would be just a matter of time until the water/lava becomes unstoppable.
Nothing else remarkable.
As fun as watching paint dry, although the first 5 hours were actually enjoyable, had to install the free version of the game because the achievement which gets you an extra weapon in killing floor 1 was bugged
I remember when this game got reviewed by the late TotalBiscuit and I actually bought this game because of him, thinking it'd be interestingly fun, however this was a huge mistake. I really wanted to be good at this game but the truth is, there's just way too many dwarves to handle and they will keep digging to places you don't want them to be, and being a 'rogue like' game you'll never know what you'll dig into. You'll wish to find treasure but other times it'll be either enemies, or the dreaded water or lava...
This game is just awful!
Now do yourself a favour and stay away from this game... else you'll become as mad like a dwarf.