Why is it so accepted that dwarves must mine too greedily and too deep? That they must have massive beards, hats with horns and drink nothing but mead? Where are all the dwarves that like drinking tea, reading classic literature and work as accountants? Blast you, Tolkein. You and your dwarves spread like a curse to all fantasy media. Dwerve is no exception.
It even references Lord of the Rings in the opening cutscene. Just replace the balrog with a horde of trolls. Still, Dwerve makes a few steps in the right direction. Our protagonist has blue hair, for one, rather than the classic ginger. His beard is also too small to braid. It’s progress. In fact, Dwerve has a lot of good ideas, even though the execution is a little wonky.
Diggy Diggy Hole
Our eponymous dwarven hero, Dwerve, breaks the dwarf mold in quite a few ways, actually. For one, he’s quite friendly towards other races. After his village gets raided by trolls, led by the witch-queen Vandra, he sets off to prevent a war with the elves before venturing into troll-filled tunnels to thwart the invasion. Trolls are classic fantasy too so they’re supposed to turn to stone in the sun and a good part of the plot is spent trying to figure out why they’re just getting a sunburn instead. It’s a fairly standard plot, that lays out a series of macguffins to chase, but is buoyed by strong character writing. Dwerve‘s interactions with other characters help to sell it.
The other way that Dwerve differentiates himself is that he doesn’t use the standard issue dwarven axe. Instead, he attacks by building turrets then running off and crying in the corner. There’s a fairly staggering array of turrets, so let me just lay out the ones I tended to use. First is a melee turret, a set of spinning blades, that kept mobs clustered together and sliced them up. They’d then get shot by arrows by my arrow turret. If anything particularly nasty came along, I’d deploy a tesla coil to repeatedly stun them. If that didn’t work, I’d throw out a zap trap to slow ’em down. This core set of weapons was the result of constant testing and tweaking.
That’s one of the core strengths of the gameplay loop. It encourages a lot of experimentation. You can usually switch up and upgrade turrets before each battle. Coupled with a generous checkpoint system, this gives you a system that encourages mixing and matching turrets to see what works. There are quite a few enemy types too and Dwerve drip-feeds you new turrets constantly. When it works well, there’s a lot of tactical joy. You can only have a limited amount of turrets at a time, so tactics are crucial. Correctly setting up a kill-zone and then watching enemies break upon it is a delight.
The Weak Point
The turret system is a great idea. It encourages adaptation and the stream of new enemy types brings in the challenge. That said, ideas are only as good as their execution and Dwerve‘s turrets have a few cracks in them. For one, Dwerve himself is fairly useless. He has a boomerang that can be used when standing still but you’re unlikely to be still for long. Besides, putting down turrets then knocking off for lunch doesn’t sound that fun. Dwerve, being a dwarf, also moves pretty slow, which seems to suggest that we should be taking our cues from the tower defence genre. Put down turrets and watch the enemies roll in.
However, the transfusion of tower defence into action-adventure is not a smooth one. Enemies come in hordes and don’t travel down set paths, for one. New spawners pop in all the time, frequently off the edge of the screen. This increases the likelihood of your turrets getting overwhelmed. Dwerve‘s slow movement speed and the slight delay when placing turrets meant I often got swamped before I could come up with a plan B. The bosses exemplify this issue the most. The worst was a big rabbit that constantly spawned goons while raining down AOE attacks. I very nearly gave up after the tenth time of being swarmed by monsters because Mr. Rabbit had destroyed all my turrets. Getting overrun gives the same feeling as losing at monopoly, only it ends with the player opposite knocking your teeth out.
I probably would’ve quit, if Dwelve hadn’t gone for the charm offensive in all other areas. There’s the writing, as mentioned before, which was enough to keep me emotionally invested. Dwerve keeps things positive while also having good interactions with other characters. It’s helped too by the nice art style. Admittedly, I’ve a weakness for pixel art (which is good given the sheer amount of titles that use it) but this is a great use. Even if Dwerve does look oddly small. It’s strange though, given the beautiful art, that we spend about three-quarters of the game stuck inside caves.
Wonky Construction
For the first third of Dwelve I was set to name it as an excellent game. The story was hitting the right notes, the world was charming and the gameplay was exciting. Then the small frustrations began to mount and cling on to things. Everything began to slide towards the tower defence, leaving the action-adventure behind. There’s just too little we can do to recover from destruction. Contrast it to Rift Rangers. In that game, you can escape being overwhelmed by your speed alone. In Dwelve, if your turrets go down then there’s nothing in your action-adventure toolkit that can help you.
That’s why it comes down to good ideas, wonky execution. The range of turrets and the enemies to use them on are is great. If this were your standard tower defence game, I’d probably be all smiles. However, the stitching together of the two genres has not been seamless and that’s where the frustrations creep in. Still, it wasn’t enough to keep me from finishing the game. Dwelve has charm in spades and if you can overlook the creeping frustrations, you’ll still have a good time. Just don’t awaken a Balrog.
