We are the Dwarves Review

We Are The Dwarves is an amazing interactive tale of a society on the brink of self-destruction. You play the part of three Dwarves, one from each of the Dwarf kingdoms that represent the different lifestyles and ideals of the Dwarf people. This team of specialists is sent out in hopes of finding a new home for the Dwarves as the one that they have known is on the verge of collapse.

The Dwarves draw their ideals and their energy from the “stars.” These stars are actually powerful crystals the emit energy used to power the Dwarves technology and hold their cities in perpetual stasis within the gravity field that the crystals emit. The team you lead is sent out in a ship that digs deeper into the unexplained space that the Dwarven kingdoms exist within to find a new “star” for the dwarves to move to.

During their travels, the ship collides with some strange substance that explodes and sends them spiraling away before trapping them in some sort of stasis anomaly. As the player, you can quickly identify this as a new star by it’s appearance but for some reason the characters seem very confused about what’s going on. It’s now your responsibility to guide the team of Dwarves through the cave systems and swamps they’ve landed in to figure out what’s happened and determine the future of the Dwarves as a whole.

When playing this game, at times you honestly forget that it’s even a game and are simply immersed in the story of these three Dwarves. The scenery and story are done so well that it immerses you into the lives of these three unlucky explorers who are trying to find a new home for their people. Beyond that the game leaves a few things to be desired. The voice acting is sub-par to say the least. With a robotic sound and choppy sentence structure on top of pitiful grammar it becomes immediately obvious that the game’s creators are not natural English speakers. This coupled with controls that are slightly glitch makes the game honestly a little difficult to play.

The game is set in a Real-time Strategy setting with squad based controls and right away based on that and the premise of the story I was excited to play this title. The problem is the hotkeys and action controls are more suited to a freeze frame type of gameplay and require precision targeting while you’re getting your head beat in by all the enemies surrounding you and often ending in the death of your squad.

A benefit this game bolsters is that it allows you to control each Dwarf individually. Unfortunately, this means relying on the game horrendous AI to control the other two Dwarves on your team which causes your squad members to literally kill themselves by making stupid mistakes that you the player could easily avoid with full control. These mistakes include but aren’t limited to walking through hazardous terrain and damaging themselves when they could just as easily take a different route and freezing mid combat while trying to use one of their special moves while the enemies continue to beat their faces in.

All in all, We Are The Dwarves was a wonderful idea that lost out due to a lot of small technical problems. That being said if you can put up with the litany of minor ineptitudes and bad voice acting the story itself is absolutely stunning and will leave you in suspense on multiple occasions.

REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.