Recent reviews by Morbidly O'Beast

Pros:
The artwork and animations in the game are a visual feast.

Cons:
However, the game falls short in several areas. It comes across as a "light" version of Battle Brothers, lacking depth in missions, weapon/armor choices, and the overall economy. One major issue is the heavy reliance on save scumming. For instance, completing a quest might reward you with either a masterwork weapon or a common one, determined purely by chance. This encourages players to save before turning in quests and reload until they receive a desirable outcome. Similar problems persist in recruiting, city missions, and dungeon exploration. Implementing a fixed random seed attached to the save file could alleviate this problem, ensuring consistent outcomes upon reload.

Additionally, the game lacks variety in classes and combat scale. After several hours, it becomes apparent that building a strong A team and B team is the most effective strategy. The missions start feeling monotonous, often repeating with slight variations in dungeon layouts. Unlike Battle Brothers, which managed to stay engaging even after countless hours of gameplay, this game struggles to maintain the same level of excitement.

While the game provides a solid foundation, it is marred by strange grammatical quirks and unintuitive word choices. Some of these issues seem to stem from the developers' attempts to avoid gendered pronouns, leading to awkward sentence structures. One example is when a character set as "he/him" pronouns in the character settings is described as doing something to "themselves" rather than "himself," even though he is a singular person. Another notable problem lies in skill descriptions, where misplaced modifiers and preposition errors make abilities unclear. For instance, the description, "Apply a Static Charge stack to adjacent enemies of the target," implies applying the stack to enemies of the target that are adjacent to it, creating confusion about whether the skill should target an ally or an enemy. The upgrade actually applies the stack to "enemies adjacent to the target" and should be corrected to clarify the intended effect. On the subject of effects, I also noticed several instances of "affect" used instead of "effect." I'm not sure if the development team may not be native English speakers, or perhaps they just really need a proofreader.

In summary, the game has potential but would benefit from significant improvements to several core systems. With future content patches, expansions, and DLC, it could evolve into a gem worth exploring.

I love Dwarf Fortress; I've been playing it off and on since the O'Reilly guide came out over a decade ago and made it easy to learn.

This release is very challenging to me, they've made the game mouse dependent and taken away things like K to Look so that can't play the game effectively with just the keyboard. So many keybindings I've been using for years are now gone or changed that I am left feeling confused and frustrated even after spending 2 hours trying to remap the game to play like the vanilla version.

The graphics actually make it much harder for me to identify anything on sight, compounding the problem of not having K to Look on the keyboard cursor. Lots of people are complaining that this is a $30 tile pack, I wish that were the case. It's a complete overhaul of the controls and menus in to something that will take a long time for any veteran to get used to. They've also focused the game on the QWERTY keyboard which makes remapping keys critical for DVORAK or similar keyboard layout users. By centering so much on the WASD keys, they've found it necessary to change all keybinds that used those letters anywhere else in the UI bringing us such wonderful changes as O for Workshops and M to Dig (previously W for workshops and D for Dig).

I took this week off work to play DF, and 2.5 hours in to day one I'm going to go back to bed because I'm too frustrated to keep fighting this new interface. I am hoping they quickly add the ASCII mode in to the game as the forced tileset and mouse use is not what I ever wanted out of the Steam release.

I can't currently recommend the game to veterans, however for new players it may be great.

Edit: 12/7/22:

I've done more experimentation trying to return to a keyboard-controlled interface and it just seems impossible. Let me start by saying that settings do not consistently save or apply between sessions. My graphics settings and keybinds have randomly reverted to default settings several times now, although it’s only ever individual settings, never all of them at once. The interface scaling reverts to 400% every single time however.

The Keyboard Cursor is not the universal answer many people seem to be implying.

If you map the directional arrow keys to move the camera and operate the keyboard cursor, then you are stuck having the cursor move in increments of 5 squares at a time. This necessitates key mapping normal view/camera navigation to one set of keys and cursor navigation to a second set of keys. The most success I've had with this is using arrows for camera movement and the numpad for cursor movement, but using arrows for cursor and Shift+Arrows for camera also works fairly well and feels more natural.

Using the keyboard cursor you cannot reasonably place workshops/furniture/constructions, you must use the mouse to position them and select the materials. If you try to do it with just the keyboard you will have to move the center of the screen to where you want the item, then hit Enter/Return to place, then use the mouse to select the materials.

The default job settings are very annoying. Why are my miner and woodcutter gathering plants rather than performing their profession? Well, now everyone does every job by default. A feature that I’m sure helps new players, but is a vexation for anyone who knows what they’re doing already.

There are issues with placing stairways where now you are required to span two levels to place a stair, so you can’t place a “stair up” to then mine in to a tile above for instance.

I think the single most needed improvement would be if they altered the interface to include the hotkeys on the menu pictures. Maybe just do a little yellow letter/symbol in the top right corner of the square icons. That would help IF they restore full keyboard functionality. As it stands the only way to play the game is with the mouse. I’ve tried mapping camera movement to “WASD” (,aoe) and then just using the mouse alone to play the game, and it works. It’s glacially slow in comparison to playing the vanilla “free” DF with only keyboard, but it does work.

I am hopeful that at some point in the near future these issues will be resolved. Until that time comes, I can not honestly recommend the game.

Hi, my name is Kyros, I identify as an overlord and I prefer the pronouns her, his, he, she, her and him. Please respect my choices or I will enforce them with an edict.

Act one works well, sets the tone, and gives you choices. Everything after that is on rails up until the very end.
I came across several game breaking bugs I had to reload old saves to work around, and now I can't even finish because I've hit another game breaking bug where I just don't get the final quest.

I want to like this game, I don't regret buying it, but it needed more QA really badly and the pacing makes it feel like it was rushed out the door. I'd give it a 7/10 and reccomend buying it after a couple months of bug fixes, or maybe when a sequal comes out.