We Are The Dwarves
When dwarves become astronauts anything goes.
In a time that can only be described as a ‘renaissance in gaming’ when indie games developers are producing games with original concepts and back to basics playability, it’s become increasingly difficult for developers to find exciting new stories and game concepts that break new ground.
We Are The Dwarves does this and for that it should be praised. It’s a single player tactical RPG that tells the story of three Dwarven astronauts whose home world power sources are dying, so they venture out into space only to have their spaceship crash and be wrecked on a strange alien world. It’s a novel concept that meshes a Dwarven fantasy with sci fi technology and one that works surprisingly well.
You start out as one of the Dwarves, Forcer, and have to find your Dwarven mates Slashfist and Shadow who are stranded somewhere in an alien landscape. You then get to play stages as these other characters, learning how each character interacts with the environment and figuring out how to best use them to your full advantage.
The developers have succeeded in creating a very immersive and fascinating alien world complete with gurgling noises, eerie music and swamps with all manner of nasty creatures. Dispatching the creatures with your weapons and abilities is quite satisfying.
But make no mistake about it, WATD is no hack and slash RPG and won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s a tactical action game in every sense of the word in which you will need to carefully consider every move you make a la Edios Interactive’s Commandos, before you initiate your action a la Blizzard’s Diablo.
WATD is no hack and slash RPG and won’t be to everyone’s taste
Rush into a room without planning with even a modest number of enemies and you will end up as dinner for some blood sucking giant insect that wants to use your pancreas to feed its offspring.
When you do initiate the action, it needs to be like a carefully performed routine that you imagined and premeditated earlier. Sometimes it may work, other times it might not - depending on your mood and any other number of things like the phase of the moon or whether you’re wearing your favourite socks.
It’s not easy, but you do have a powerful tool at your disposal in the form of a feature to slow down time during combat. Enemies can hear you, smell you and see you, so successfully achieving your objectives means knowing these key principles. Finding cover will keep you out of the line of sight, and moving just short distances at a time will make you less likely to be heard. As for smell, be sure not to cross an enemies’ patrol route otherwise your stench could rout you out.
Using the environment to your advantage is one important tactic you must learn. Forcer’s weapon of choice is a shotgun that allows him to blow enemies off ledges, so if you’re outnumbered it may be wise to wait until your enemies are where you want them. But beware, because the gun’s powerful kickback can also blow Forcer off a ledge too.
Shadow’s speciality, as his namesake
suggests, is stealth and he can use this to great advantage by moving into the cover of bushes and trees without detection. Skilful use of Shadow will mean unsuspecting enemies won’t even know what hits them when you engage them from your covert hiding place.
But Smashfist, the melee unit of the three, is not without his own special abilities. He has a power that allows him to move faster when in combat, which is handy for dictating where you want to place yourself before enemies approach. He also has a spinning attack perfect for taking on multiple foes.
The technological side of things is well represented in a complex ability tree and armour system. Each layer of your spacesuit armour that you repair increases your defensive ability and operates new subsystems such as a flashlight to light dark places. Improving and managing both becomes essential to the overriding strategy of the game.
But WATD is not for everyone. It can be very hard finding the right strategy at given points and you will frequently find yourself slaughtering your character over and over again in some kind of sadomasochistic Groundhog Day before you finally prevail. You will get very familiar with the load screen when this happens and ponder very deeply why the game doesn’t automatically load your last saved game automatically.
We also thought there weren’t enough intuitive tips, especially in the earliest parts of the game when developing strategies to use down the track.
But our biggest gripe with WATD is with the game’s text. Although written in English, it can still be quite difficult to understand. We even got a textbox written in Russian at one stage, despite our preferences set on English and can only wonder if language was properly scrutinised before the beta was finished.
On the whole WATD has a lot of potential, and it’s fair to say the story and gameplay are worthy of the time and effort you will spend in it. If you can overlook a few inconveniences and are a fan of tactical RPGs, this should be a game that you can really get into.