Dwarf Fortress

The concept of this game is Good, The execution is broken, unpolished, with massive memory leaks that ruin all late game gameplay. Lots of gimmicky illusions of simulation. Yet the world constantly overrides cause and affect. Let alone the crappy diplomatics and civilization interactions. I see now why rimworld popped off. Too many people desperate for a concept they don't hold people accountable for decades of lack of polish. lol

I played the original Dwarf Fortress for hundrets of hours. Loved that game. Couldn't wait for the Steam version. Sadly the Steam version is unplayable because of its terrible UI. In the original you could comfortably play with the keyboard. Every hotkey was shown on the screen. The menues were easy to read, compact and fast to navigate. Now they are harder to read, waste space and most elements are not controllable by keyboard. For some reason I still don't understand, they decided, Dwarf Fortress now has to be played by mouse. In the beginning it was said to be fixed. But after 4 years exactly nothing improved. So by now I am certain, that the UI will never be fixed.

This is the greatest colony management sim of all time. There is nothing more to say.

New player experience is very limited, i wish i didnt have to watch a 10 hr video tutorial series to play. Honestly it's overhyped and the UI really needs improving.

Am I the crazy one? I played it for a bit and cannot stand the UI and controls. I watched a bunch of reviews and wanted to like it, but this just isn't for me. Maybe one day I'll come back and try it again, but if you don't like clunky controls, I cannot recommend this game. Grade: D

This game is a deep and obscure, broad and with obvious oversights, complex and unbalanced colony simulation similar to Rimworld but in a 3D world and much older. I don't recommend the game because of its outstanding and longlasting issues that I don't expect to get fixed in the coming years. Economic values are badly balanced. During embark, you can take a cloth bag for a certain price, or a unit of sand for much cheaper that will come in a cloth bag that you then get for free. Instead of taking barrels, take drinks, which will come in free barrels. The list goes on. Trading with caravans also suffers from bad design. You can easily buy out the whole caravan with just a couple of barrels of prepared food or a bunch of wooden bolts, that are easy to make. Taking about bolts, when they are fired and don't break, they are individual items and can't be stacked again. If you ask the caravan to bring stones and ores, they bring only a few and nothing else. The caravans are not designed to maximize profit. So no, you can't roleplay an alliance with humans where they supply you with plenty of ore and you pay them with steel armor and weaponry from your mighty dwarfen magma forges. The interface has become better in this version of the game than it is in the free version. But it's still bad and unintuitive. The developers should observe people new to the game to learn with what they struggle and to figure out ways to improve the UI and design. The UI can also get stuck and refuse some input sometimes. The game doesn't force goals on you. You can set them yourselves. But many obvious goals like survival in hard environment is either easy or impossible and economic goals lack the necessary design features. So you can try to keep your dwarfs happy. But they will get unhappy for unintuitive reasons and the game won't make it easy for you to figure out what is going wrong. So you try to make a mighty army. Good. Get some steel, build armor and weapons, get barracks, assign all dwarfs but farmers, cooks, and clothes to squads and let them train. Done. The game is improving. But at the speed of a glacier. If some issues of the above are fixed, years will have passed. All of them won't even be fixed in a decade. And the issues I listed are just the tip of the iceberg. There are people in the community who could name more and more serious issues. I feel bad not recommending it because clearly so much love has gone into many aspects of the game but it also lacks so much care in many others. In 2035 I'll revisit this review to see if the game has improved.

Janky ass game with janky ass mechanics with janky ass U.I Nothing in this game is intuitive, the newcomer experience is the most garbage ass experience that I had in quite some time. I really want to like the game, but when it becomes an obligation to have a reddit/wiki page open just to decipher the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ U.I you know that you are in a ♥♥♥♥ show. Good luck to find a answer to when the workshop simply stops working and the U.I of it stops existing, good luck to resolve the problems that comes when ALL workers stop working and there's no way to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ resolve unless you download DFHACK. It could be such an amazing game, but instead it's this maze that people swear it's and incredible game because they have spent so many hours in it, that they can't even notice the stockholm syndrome

Hard to learn. Most of it is intuitive if you think about it. Most things are pretty obvious, but we are just lazy to really think and figure things out, bcs the game explains some of it, people just need to click on stuff and read. When I learned the game, I could really enjoy it. Stopped building like youtube tutorials, made stuff as I felt it was right and the game allows that. Can do pretty much anything the way you want. The freedom in this game is unique. Just take some time to learn it, and you wont see City Builders the same after Dwarf Fortress :heart: