Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress in an absolute gem and a piece of modern art that should be regarded as one of the most unique games in history. It is a dream or a vision more than a game, in fact, many would argue it is barely a game and some points would be true. The UI is barely there, many systems are convoluted and unintuitive, important settings are hidden and the graphics are what people in the year 1980 imagined video games to look like by the end of the millennium. The graphics is what turns many people off, but this was somewhat remedied with this release and its premium graphic pack. But if you are interested in delving into the deep dark, I would strongly suggest to use the original ASCII graphics. After few hours of learning which symbol means what, it will suddenly click and you will be dragged into the dream of Tarn Adams, kicking and screaming for more. Dwarf Fortress is truly addictive and also brings back the better parts of the fantasy genre, where your own mind fills the gaps and gives the creatures a voice and artpieces a shape and an emotion. Try it.

There's really nothing more to say that hasn't been said a thousand times about Dwarf Fortress. Buy it, you'll get your money's worth and more. This magnificient autism project deserves your patronage.

I've played this game long before it came to Steam. I've spent may hours playing this game. This game is a classic. That being said, the game needs a major overhaul. The user interface is terrible. It has a sharp learning curve if you never played this game before in part because the user interface. The graphics would be way better if they used something like Rimworld. When your fortress becomes large, it is difficult to manage and easy for it to fall into chaos when dwarves start going crazy. Nothing has been fixed to utilize the trash created from killing creatures like cartilage, nervous system, scales and other stuff created when butchering a creature. The items are useless and not easy to dispose of. You end up with a dump spot with hundreds of junk stuff that sits there until you reach magma and can finally toss it in the fire. I've never been able to use step ladders or harvest from trees. Dwarves will toss worn clothes all over the place and no one will ever pick it up or put it in a stockpile. The one person that is doing all the development of the game needs to hire a professional team and get this game fixed properly if he wants to make a high quality game. The game has all kinds of half finished ideas that currently serve no purpose, like vials, extracts, forging coins, trapping vermin. Little dead vermin whose corpses pile up everywhere like I don't see the point of junk like dead hamster in lizards in my stockpile that never decomposes or disappears, have to throw them into the massive dump spot with all the other junk, who has time clicking dump on every little tiny corpse when you managing a large fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is the most complex game I've ever played and I find it both intimidating and endlessly fascinating. If you've ever wanted a colony builder+grand strategy+life sim+wargame, Dwarf Fortress is all of that and more, in my opinion. The endlessly entertaining emergent stories that come up in this game make it replayable in the extreme, and I'm always finding new things I'd never known about.

Too many simple things are broken or extremely tedious to do. DFhack helps, but it shouldnt be as necessary as it is and even with it, a lot of stuff is extremely frustrating and not in a good way. Its an amazing game, but I would never recommend it to someone unless they fix the basic stuff (for example, let me build a simple wall. Right now, if you try to build walls around an enclosed room the corners will not be completed)

Dwarf Fortress is a cult classic that has captured many hours of my time and influenced the creation of many famous games. Tarn Adams put his heart and soul into a free product that I love and many in the world do as well. Though I cannot recommend the paid version of this game because it has been many years since it went for sale, a small fortune has been made by a pair of brothers living in their mom's house, and not much progress has been made to some of the core promises that were being made about modernizing the look and feel of the antiquated free version. While the roadmap is large, and the code base being ported over into the "new UI" is a seemingly daunting task, the point remains that the Adam's brothers made a conscious decision to create a paid product and open themselves to the court of public opinion. That they are taking money and executing on their promise to deliver results! I do not care that the code base is alleged to be over 700,000 lines, that they were self taught, or built a large library of spaghetti. The passion project that brought joy to many is not license to take my money and run! What matters is that they are bolting that spaghetti slop into a garbage interface that is unintuitive, bugged, and leaving a lot to the modding community that builds UI through DF Hack. My game crashes frequently, the same culprits being opening doors, movement, and dialogue. In fact, this game is largely unplayable without DF Hack and third party utilities, unless you like memorizing hundreds of key combinations that don't make sense. Which was always a gripe I had in the original DF, but hey, that was free. What's more, a lot of the features of the free version are simply not "ported" into the paid version. What you get is a watered down version of dwarf fortress with a really ♥♥♥♥♥♥ UI that takes way too many clicks out of your mouse's life. It's been 2 1/2 years at the time of this review and we are still waiting on many adventure mode features from the free version and DF hack had to champion many features left out of the UI in fortress mode. The Adams brothers have no excuse on this, because they went public with a sale, and the progress is stagnant, the product sub-par, and the bugs, glitches, and lack of content going years unchanged. They are swamped and should have the funds to hire help. They sold over 600,000 copies in the first 24 hours it went on sale! They won't do it because Tarn is seemingly not a trusting fellow and lords over his mountain of spaghetti code like Smeagol and the one ring. He is sitting on a dumpster fire of code and needs to realize his company owns the IP of Dwarf Fortress and letting people sign NDA's and see and work on the code base is in his interest. Tarn is probably more embarrassed he is using magic numbers that only he knows what they are for. I'm old enough to have built applications with magic arrays and get criticized by me peers for doing so! Save yourself a few bucks and play the free version, it has way more content.

The most frustratingly promising game I've ever played. I really, really want to like it, but it's still super unintuitive, even to a lover of Rimworld, Crusader Kings and Kenshi. and annoys *far* more often than it delights. Today, I thought I'd give it another go as a Goblin adventurer. Was guided towards a temple. Found the person I needed to talk to and clicked to have my character path to somewhere near them. He jumped in the water and drowned. Very, very slowly, without me being able to do anything. Losing was not fun. Even outside of gameplay and UI woes, everything, whether people, cities, civilisations or magical artefacts, ends up with the same formulaic, jarring and faintly ridiculous names, like "Squigglyfarms Siltbuckets", which makes it hard to tell one thing from another, especially when it's only translated *some* of the time. This will probably end up as an incredible and at least somewhat accessible game (and I hope it does!), but not in this decade.