The Dwarves Reviews
An unsatisfying, forced march through the source material.
The Dwarves boasts a strong story that's taken from a bestselling novel, and it generally honors that lineage with a cast of likable and ably voiced characters. It's a good foundation, but unfortunately it's not strong enough to make up for the deficiencies of its gameplay, which include unfulfilling RPG elements and a stubborn camera.
The Dwarves is hard to recommend to any but the most diehard RPG fan, due to poor combat and terrible performance.
The Dwarves has a lot of potential. If it was made on a AAA budget, I believe it could have been one of the best games this year. But it wasn’t. I thoroughly enjoyed my 15 hours with it, but I’m also well aware of its numerous, easily identifiable, shortcomings. If your a dwarf connoisseur, then I can recommend this game. If you enjoy fantasy RPGs, and don’t mind tactical (though it’s hardly that) combat, then I can also recommend this game. But if you don’t particularly love either of these things, then The Dwarves from KING Art Games, may not be the dwarves for you.
A strong premise that gets lost with a bad execution on its visuals and dull combat.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
There’s a lot of love that went into the creation of The Dwarves but the glimmers of brilliance are dulled by the numerous problems with the combat, as well as the conflicting nature of the narrative with the few moments where you are able to make your own choices. Chances are those who will enjoy this game the most are fans of the books, but it’s a largely forgettable game for everyone else.
THQ Nordic and King Art Games bring us The Dwarves, an RPG adaptation of Markus Hetiz's novels that, despite good ideas, doesn't live up to its source material albeit its entertaining story.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Almost everything from The Dwarves‘ gameplay to the presentation seems unpolished. It’s a real shame, since there are some good ideas, and the book it’s based upon is ripe for a video game adaptation. The mission objectives are far too rigid, the controls too cumbersome, and ultimately it’s a game that constantly gets in the way of itself. Every moment of enjoyment was quickly followed by bouts of annoyance, and this title clearly needed more time in development.
Underwhelming RPG elements and character customisation, poor loading times and a map screen that now seems to have a mind of its own do hold back the game from being something great. Those with a penchant for a tightly woven narrative and tactical thinking will enjoy the experience, but it is difficult to overlook some of the more glaringly obvious problems.
The world of The Dwarves is interesting, and maybe with some patches down the road this can become a game I can get behind, as it stands now though, this is a tough sell.
Selecting areas you can’t go to resulted in a glitchy cursor bouncing around, and the UI in general lacks polish.
A strategy RPG that suffers from a distinct lack of technical polish and unsatisfying combat, The Dwarves superb orchestral soundtrack, intriguing narrative and charismatic cast almost make up for its technical deficiencies, lending hope that future instalments might improve upon what we see here.
The Dwarves is a role-playing game that fails to reach its full potential. Its interesting battle concepts are marred by a mediocre execution, very limited RPG mechanics, and just too many technical issues on PlayStation 4. Despite this, the game still managed to be somewhat enjoyable thanks to the gripping yet not too original story, and charming characters. Due to gameplay and technical shortcomings, however, only die hard high fantasy fans may find some enjoyment in The Dwarves. Everyone else would do better in looking elsewhere.
A good story with good cinematics held captive by terrible performance and bad gameplay. There are some good narrative moments in The Dwarves, but they aren't worth suffering through the game. Just read the book its based on.
The Dwarves has [fun factor] in spades. The game is at once lighthearted in it’s art and humor, but also unsettling and sometimes wincingly violent. The dwarves are fun to be around. I wanted to see more of what they had to say and then take them into battle to put their mallets, axes, and great-weapons to use against the Crowd AI. Fun Factor doesn’t overcome the game’s issues, but it certainly helps mitigate them.
The Dwarves is an RPG game inspired by Markus Hetiz's best-seller. Despite having a nice story and a decent graphic section, the long-duration loading times and a very rough camera system, makes the game experience worse and worse.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
While The Dwarves is an excellent story-based experience, the gameplay surrounding it serves to quickly sour most of the enjoyment that can be found, and most fans would be better off rereading the books.
This is the kind of game that makes you happy Kickstarter is a thing.
The Dwarves feels as though it's stuck between being an indie game and a triple-A game. And when that happens all sorts of bad things can happen. The game suffers from terrible cameras to glitches but it also benefits from a great story and voice cast. This game is a pure mix bag.
Everyone needs more beards and beer in their lives, but maybe not from these dwarves.