Dwarrows started out as an idea – as many games do obviously – but saw some limitations along the way. Luckily indie developers can find means to help through various services. Dwarrows used Kickstarter to make their game a reality. First PC/Mac/Linux users could try their hands on the game and now Playstation and Xbox gamers can have a go too.
Help the Wood-Elves
In Dwarrows, the Wood-Elves are a wandering folk after their land has suffered a great flood. Queen Mayor Solatia wants to gather the “herd” and give them a place to live all together in unison. After strucking a deal with the Archyrons, the Wood-Elves are granted the Dusken Woodlands as their new home soil. Although the Dusken Woodlands are filled with resources, the land has seen better days and needs a lot of attention to regain some form of glory fit for the Wood-Elves. Here’s where an expert team of colonizers comes in. Consisting of only 3 people, the team feels they are compatible enough to help out the Wood-Elves.
Play as three characters
In Dwarrows you play as each of the three-team members. You have to switch between Dwarf Dwilben the Gatherer who is your main guy to collect various resources needed to build up the town. The building is in hands of Gnome Gloia the Builder who is in charge of designing the town to fit everyone’s needs. With much land to discover around the Dusken Woodlands, the halfling Horbir the Explorer completes the team. He is in charge of looking around for treasure and discovering long-forgotten dungeons. A specific task can (for the most part) only be handled by one character. Switched accordingly will be a constant ordeal during the game.
Peaceful Town-building
Dwarrows main purpose is to be a peaceful town-building game. There are no enemies to worry about. The only pressing matter you’ll have to attend to is the needs of the townsfolk in order to keep them happy. Expanding too fast without supplying enough food, bathhouses, education buildings, … will surely make your experience less than optimal. Plan ahead and don’t be afraid to delete stuff in order to rebuild a better version. Speaking of better versions… The game has a strange way of unlocking updated buildings. When you build enough of the same buildings you will be able to combine them and potentially unlock a new one. For example, two tents combine into a wooden house, a house, and a small store will turn into an inn, … I wasn’t too fond of this “guessing” system to be honest but I do applaud the idea of adding something new to the genre.
Rinse and repeat
Town-building games are fun if they offer enough variety. Dwarrows tries new things but in the end, I found myself doing the same things over and over again. The resources gathering is fun at first but after building a few things everything is depleted again. You then have to switch to your dwarf again and start chopping away for wood and hacking for stone and gold. These things become boring very fast. This part of the game was like watching paint dry. I which there was an automatic way to send out the dwarf to gather resources instead of needing to go through the same motions over and over again while you rather just build and keep everybody happy.
Explore to open up
With caps on how many resources you can gather in one go, you’ll soon find this annoyingly small. The game offers ways to expand these caps but these were also quite tedious. The explorer goes out in the world and finds treasures but also dungeons. These can be explored and are essentially a big puzzle level where all three need to work together to reach the end. The dungeons will have you thinking but won’t stomp you, making Dwarrows an ideal game for younger kids. Once you complete a dungeon, an artifact is earned which can then be used to upgrade your characters and make some aspects of the game less annoying. If your game starts out annoying and you need to grind away to make it less annoying you more or less lost me already.
Feels like they bit off more than they could chew
I feel Dwarrows started out with a good idea but wasn’t well executed. Adding exploring and puzzles into the town-building genre is a neat idea. Two characters are standing idle while you control another making everything feel so long-winded. There are “warps gems” to be found to make the backtracking less an ordeal but these were never positioned close enough. Despite warping I still needed to switch 2/3 times between characters to get them all in one place in order to solve a certain puzzle. Once you collected enough resources, artifacts, and other stuff you wanted to reap the benefits of your work by jumping back into the building aspect. Your builder would have to been lead back to base camp in order to do so making this yet another tedious task making me wish I was playing something else.
Conclusion
Dwarrows didn’t quite do it for me. The ideas are neat and I always applaud small studios making an effort to make these types of games but this one doesn’t feel right.
