Now here is an interesting way to gather attention for your product: spell it incorrectly. Sounds stupid, but it worked on me. With that, Dwarfs!?

Actually, that isn't true at all; Dwarfs is an acceptable spelling of the plural of dwarf, but Dwarves just looks so much better. Either way, the title was what caught my attention.

I really need to say that I hated this game when I played the demo. I played it for five minutes, deleted the demo and resolved that it wasn't worth ten dollars.

Then I dreamt about it all night, woke up and felt like I was going through withdrawal. Bought it, didn't regret it.

Back on track, though; the name caught my attention but it was the premise that sucked ten dollars out of my bank account: dwarves are greedy, dwarves are stupid, dwarves will die. The core part of the game pits you -- possibly even in a pit -- as a sort of over-seer to a dwarven colony in a real time strategy sort of way. I say sort of because although you do have some control, after a point there is just too much going on to effectively micro-manage everything. See, the real premise is to build wealth, and you do that by mining. But the miner dwarves will continue to mine regardless of whether or not you order them to. Oh, and they never stop spawning, so even with ten -- and mind you, the average game will have you at two hundred -- it becomes difficult to stop them from doing stupid things.

See dwarves are really, really stupid. And greedy. It's very reminiscent of Moria from Lord of the Rings and the game feels very much like you're playing out the beginning of Moria. I say this because the combination of greedy and stupid is a very bad one; if there is a block separating your base from a lake of magma, a dwarf will dig into it, die, and release the magma, which will then destroy your base. Truthfully, if this happens, it likely doesn't matter. Dwarves are expendable and for the most part magma isn't difficult to stop. So, rather than create an aggravating situation, it becomes hilarious. Another game could not pull this off. It's great to watch your colony flourish and then inevitably die due to their greed, especially when this happens as a result of a dwarf digging through a wall you placed to stop magma.

It is great, until you discover how to completely block off the magma and water flows so that they can never again be released. Then the premise is gone and the game becomes boring. There isn't any challenge or difficulty after that point because any threat is extremely easy to resolve. So ok, no challenge usually means go up a difficulty level.

Except the difficulty levels don't really make the game more difficult. Raising the difficulty does two things: water/magma flow faster and placing things costs more gold. Ok, and this is harder, but it's harder in the sense that you need to pay more attention or manage your gold better, which I don't consider an increase in difficulty. Combined with the lack of variety to this game (although the maps are randomly generated, they all appear identical) Dwarfs!? quickly lost my interest. When I say quickly, I mean I stopped playing after two or three days with a total playtime of seven hours (admittedly, still a lot, but still). Or maybe, rather than losing my interest, Dwarfs!? just didn't care enough to bother keeping it, and who could blame them? I'm not an interesting fellow. I really don't know though; I keep calling and although Dwarfs!? answers, she says we'll hang out tomorrow. But then tomorrow comes and she still isn't there. Another call, another reassurance that it'll get better, and... well. Yeah.

But then I have clinging issues.

That's the core of the game, though. Dwarves dig. There are a few different game modes but they're all essentially the same. Arcade mode forces a time limit onto the map, so you have to get the highest score you can in 5/15/30/60 minutes. Endless is well... endless, unless your base gets destroyed, which might not happen, causing you to not earn a score (awesome reward for playing the game well, right?). Dark mode is just arcade mode but the entire map is hidden. Rush mode spawns dwarves at a massive rate, and the game only ends after 200 have died. I want to cover Rush mode a bit more because, well, it's just silly. There are too many dwarves to effectively keep track of after even a minute, and they don't stand out enough from the monsters to know that there are any killing your guys. The only challenge here is keeping your dwarves from digging into lava/water before you can close it off.

The only two modes worth mentioning are campaign and base defend because they really break away from the core gameplay by reimagining it.

Don't let the name campaign mislead you like it did me, because it is certainly not a campaign at all. Even within a few of the five missions -- all available at the start -- they are referred to as challenges, which is a much more fitting name because THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE (also, if you missed it or are new to the internet, caps here denotes an angry man-voice, and if you're not I'm clearly inserting this so I don't look like an idiot for the LOLCAPSLOCK). You're given a few warriors, can't spawn any more, and have to beat about twenty or thirty monsters plus a boss. Or there are ten or fifteen magma flows that are about to overrun your base and you need to hold it off for three minutes. They're just stuff like that with a small amount of mildly entertaining exposition beforehand; small, nearly story-less challenges that take the core game but give it a small, interesting twist. They're neat, but I beat all of them in about thirty minutes, which is an appallingly short amount of time. Well, it would be if this were actually a campaign, but see sentence two of this paragraph.

Now, base defend. It's a tower defense game which is nothing like anything else Dwarfs!? offers. It's alright, not very good, but not very bad either. The trick here is that, for the first four waves, a dwarf starts at a monster spawner and is trying to dig back to the base. You've got some gold so you can order him to move around the map in a pattern, thus creating the path towards your base. That part is neat but the rest is just kind of annoying. You don't really make enough gold to buy more towers, so if you get far enough that the special camouflaged units start spawning and you don't have enough to buy the only tower that can hurt them (unless they're attacking anyway), then that is too bad and you lose. That's fine though; that's how tower defense games work. I just wish there had been some sort of indication that there were monsters like that prior to the stage they were introduced on.

But whatever, base defend isn't the core game, so it not being the best doesn't matter that much.

What does matter is that there are plenty of small, irritating glitches throughout. Dwarves quickly lose interest in the orders you give them and just start doing other things. The digger dwarves can become stuck on digging minerals and just... keep digging at one forever, if you let it. Oh, and one interesting glitch I did notice is that if two of them are digging at the same block, they'll both gain gold when they've destroyed it. They're just small things, sure, but you would think that they'd have been cleared away during development. Or, I don't know, maybe it was worse at some point and what we have right now is much better.

Forgive me for skipping the graphics and music for so long, but really... there isn't much going on there. The graphics suck but that isn't why you're here, so who cares? If you say you do I can assure you that bad things will happen, by the way. It's just a 2-D overhead game with almost no variety. As for the music, well, I liked it but there isn't much. It could have had more but, as it is, it's fine.

Now, after all of that I can almost hear you asking your monitor if Dwarfs!? is a good game. That's a difficult question to answer and despite not being your monitor I'll make an attempt. Near the end of any game I started I really wasn't doing anything. Sure, I stopped a magma flow or two but other than that my input was minimal. What it comes down to is the premise that sold me on the game; really, after a point that's all that's left, so I really don't know if I was enjoying the game or if I was enjoying the idea of the game. But, in the end, even if I wasn't enjoying the game itself, I was having a good time while playing it. For ten dollars I would say it's worth a purchase, but hey, I'm just a bunch of words located in some tube.