izigame.me

When I write a review for a game, it is usually because I have a lot to say about it. This review will include my major criticisms of the game, and I do so with love. I am not a long time fan and have never played the ASCII versions of the game. That being said, I LOVE this game. I practically can't shut up about it at home and with my friends. I want this game to succeed as much as it can. Dwarf Fortress is going to hit some people just right and become a staple in their gaming pastime for years at a time. I have been absolutely engrossed, entranced, dismayed and made to laugh so much from playing this game in the last 2 weeks. These beautiful moments happen in seemingly organic ways, making them feel special and original on your playthroughs, and often surprising you. The basic gameplay is not any more difficult than your typical sim management game. The devil is in the details.
There are tons of intricacies to the game that are not spelled out in the very succinct and few tutorials provided. The tutorials give you the gist of what any particular menu is for. However, if you are not used to having certain things not work intuitively and similarly to other games in the sim genre, or are not used to logic gate style controls for specific tasks, you are going to have a hard time fine-tuning how you produce certain outcomes.
It personally took me quite a bit of trial-and-error to understand how various objects in the game are categorized, and thus how stockpiles actually worked. Stockpiles are essential to playing, and the way it toggles and categorizes items is not entirely intuitive. When you get the hang of something like this, it can be a huge relief. Another thing is how there is this huge wiki that is a great resource online curated by fans for all sorts of things in the game, including many things I think should be included in the game. For instance: sometimes you are given demands by the Dwarves to construct certain types of areas related to their group, like a guild, temple complex, royal throne room, etc. There is no reference in the game that actually tells you what a temple complex or royal throne room is. There are many hints in the game that you may be able to infer what to do and reason backwards, which requires a lot of patience. A major example of this is how when you want to produce any good, but you don't already know what the recipe is, you have to queue it. You wait for the dwarf to go try to make the thing and then complain and cancel the order and tell you, "Needs x amount of thing". Now you know you need that thing, so you have to find what makes that thing, figure out how to source that thing's base ingredient, and spend time reorganizing your work force to sourcing that thing, building the workshop that processes that thing, and then getting it to the first dwarf. That is a lot of backwards reasoning , with writing on your notepad what to get, when it would be possible to include some way of seeing a recipe in the game on some reference sheet. Not my biggest complaint.
When it comes to the UI, DF comes down to menu management. Everything you do is text menus and scrolling across the map. I like a good menu. I like making "number go up" and looking at inventories. My issue with it is the ability to use the information on the menus and enter commands between menus is not fluid.
The windows for various menus can't be interacted with simultaneously, and can't be focused between with your mouse or with your keyboard in an easy way. You have to exit out of every menu before you can interact with another. On top of that, when there are circumstances where you can have two different windows/menus on the screen, the game doesn't always know which window you are trying to manipulate. This means that having your mouse hovered over one menu doesn't focus your UI, or often even by order of last menu you opened being the focused window.
What this looks like: you will have two menu windows open taking up the majority of your screen but overlapping so you see one on top and the other partially, and your mouse wheel will more often than not scroll the map's Z-levels underneath the windows instead of the menus you have up. Since you can't tab between windows like you can a window manager (maybe there are just hotkeys but I am not sure) or have your cursor focus on a window, and instead have to close the window on top to interact with another, and there is information that is exclusive to different menus, you spend a lot of time opening and closing windows to check and correspond information and commands. You also can't resize them or manually move them as far as I can tell. They are in fixed positions.
There are toggles in these menus that will sort lists in different ways. Well, every time you exit out of a menu, the game resets each menu's sorting back to default way. This means if you want to reference information in lists a certain way, you have to click that toggle to your liking to sort it every time.
There might be something said for the game originally being made to use the keyboard predominantly and how you would manipulate the cursor, the visuals being originally pure ASCII, and it being so text-and-grid heavy. I can respect that. BUT, if you are going to launch it as a 1.0 on Steam and convert it with all the features for mouse usage with pixel graphic for mainstream users, this feels like an oversight. I'm not saying it is easy to develop a game, but it is a contemporary standard. The point of the features is to make management easier. I will admit that I am not going to remember every detail of information from these menus for reference to other menus for hundreds of little sprite people, nor am I likely to learn how to navigate DF's UI with the same attention & effort I would to learn how to use Vim without organically doing so over hundreds of hours with all the keybindings.
I won't carry on about all the bugs I know about, because there are even more that I don't know yet. Bugs happen. Most of the time they aren't a big deal. Some of them are, IMO.
The bug that had been a problem for me is imprisonment.
I have had nearly a dozen dwarves imprisoned for various reasons, including nobles that manage the fort. Not one character that has been imprisoned has ever been released. The ones that have served their time don't leave their cage. I looked at forums and tried to use work-arounds, such as suspending the dungeon, or moving the cages around, or even using exploits that remove a dwarf from the cage (specifically the ones that had served their sentence) and the dwarves walk back into the cage or a different cage. They never leave prison. They waste away and go insane no matter what. I have read when other people encounter this. Their dwarves at least eventually starve to death. Not mine. They live, even if the other dwarves stop feeding them or bringing them water. They just permanently occupy a cage. I lose the dwarf and the cage. The only thing I can think to do is actually use in-world ways to destroy them.
This kind of bug is disappointing to me, because the entire point of the game is the DRAMA. There are always more problems than you can solve no matter what you do. This bug defies logic, but also undermines the game's design. It robs me the experience of seeing how dwarves handle reintegration into the general population of the fortress, and I think that is such a shame!
The Queen of my civilization sentenced my Duchess, who ran the fortress before the Queen moved in, to prison for 100 days. The Duchess was stripped of her station and was succeeded while in prison. Now, I'll never know how she would act if she had to live with that after being released.
Other than those things, the game is incredible for sim-game lovers. Just get it with warts and all. After a handful of hours, you'll get why everyone who plays it loves it.