"WARNING!
You need activate gamepad control to play the multiplayer.
YES"
Ummm... does not compute? For multiple reasons?
I've apparently bought half a dozen so-called "games" from the Ukrainian company Whale Rock for 1-2 bucks a pop over the years, and apparently overpaid for We Are the Dwarves at $1.24 in 2019, as it's now $1.19. GoG promoted it pretty heavily for a while and what can I say, I'm not completely immune to advertising.
How would I summarize the gameplay... a platformer without jumping? A single-player top-down shoot 'em up? Granted I didn't even get far enough into it to meet the third character.
I did have some fun with the starting guy's quirk, using a shotgun with heavy recoil which also functions as maneuvering via reaction pistol while floating in space. But the first time you're required to use it in the very first tutorial stage to back your way through a bush, my character fell through the terrain half the time; then the animation stuck so I was sliding around on my ass through two maps.
Welcome to the game. Expect much more of the same.
- only a bit of ass-sliding after, I found the tutorial, instead of blocking your progress until you've cleared the map, loops you back to the beginning if you fail to kill the second set of mobs
- your dumpy little Magellans lack a map or compass, in light of which the maze-like levels just scream "timesink"
- you can only move in 2D, but your skills can miss or impact terrain on the z-axis
- the interface is generally unresponsive, lacking hit confirmation or damage warnings, leading to a lot of surprise insta-deaths or unaccountable misses
- in contrast, you're prompted with captain obvious dopey voiceovers like "next time, I better wait until the beast hides" repeating long, long after you've already gotten the point
- your clicks may or may not over-ride your current action at random,
leading to spamming buttons hoping your command will go through
- have to keep spam-clicking due to hit detection failing and clicking ground to move instead
- it's real time with pause, but the constant glitchiness somehow forces more pauses than if it were turn-based
- with all these problems hitting you in the face in the very tutorial, production time nevertheless sank into cutscenes instead of interface/intelligibility/bugtesting
Which reminds me, probably anyone'll mention the comically terrible voicing and writing.
Perfectly excusable had the developers been aware of their limitations and not ladled on the flavor text in a typo-filled ode to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Being non-Anglophone's no crime, but at least steer clear of jargon like "outta whack"! Redundant one-paragraph journal entries for the same monster (e.g. "sludge queen" and "sludge queen behavior") and obviously Babelfished terms like "giant rootage" plus missing spaces and undeleted punctuation here and there or "kamikadze" would be bad enough. But even the backstory, while superficially novel, resolves to a pile of nonsense. You're dwarven astronauts that live underground and get their power from glowing colored stars so you dive down through the ocean then fall into a cavern full of tiny black holes and also swamps and you wear spacesuits with no helmets... all of which might be more palatable if presented as the Sonic the Hedgehog pretext for a plot it is, instead of taking itself deadly serious as a grim, determined fight for survival. (Why not just call it a Hollow Earth adventure, which is all it is anyway?)
There may be some decent ideas scattered among the garbage (the recoil mechanic is fun enough) but it would honestly be too aggravating to dig them out. Honestly can't tell whether Whale Rock's dollar-valued library is some asset-flip scam, a pretext for programming novices to charge you for their homework or honest but ludicrous creative attempts. For now I'll join the majority who Would've Been the Dwarves (tm) and uninstall.
For the price of a candy bar, I may even have gotten my money's worth.
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