At a glance...

A Game of Dwarves preview

I love management games, and those who read my review of Cities in Motion should know that by now. The 1990s were a great time for this genre with the likes of Bullfrog producing rich titles such as Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper. Developer Zeal loves this era too and told us as much when we sat down with them in a hotel room at Gamescom. They loved the era of "old school management", but felt that it has been left by the wayside and so A Game of Dwarves was born. From the outset, you can tell that this game has been inspired by these type of games, particularly Dungeon Keeper.

It's no surprise then, given the title, that dwarves play a critical role in the game. You take on the role of Dwarven, a prince who commands a settlement of dwarf minions. The prince is your avatar into the world, so should they die, it's game over. You need to help your kingdom of dwarves grow and conquer, and to do that you need to protect the prince from any threats that may arise, but also feed him; it was pointed out that initially, all the prince does is eat and sleep! The dwarfs are a resourceful race and so as you tunnel through grids of rock, you can use the resources that you mine to build objects and decorate rooms. For example, you'll need fertile ground to plant trees to feed your growing empire, and beds for them to rest. This isn't your typical Dungeon Keeper though, as you don't designate areas for one purpose or another. A Game of Dwarves relies on objects rather than assigning roles to rooms, which was demonstrated to us; a bed was placed directly in the middle of a corridor. This frees players from the constraints of these types of games and the mine really is yours to design and build. There were many different types of material that could be used, some for the construction of useful objects, whilst others were seemingly for decoration only. A pink-coloured stone seemed to catch our demonstrator's eye as he plastered the floors and walls with it for decoration. This decoration feeds into the dwarves' happiness rating, which gives you a number of bonuses. A ladder, for example - whilst functional - won't give you much of a boost, but stairs - whilst more costly - will make your dwarves happy. It's not essential, so players who would rather mine then decorate can still do well.

Another feature that separates this from the Dungeon Keeper of old is verticality. You will be expanding out in all directions as you grow the settlement. This not only means those grid blocks to the side, but also up and down too, using the aforementioned ladders and stairs to help your dwarves get around, and the deeper you go, the greater the rewards (and dangers) will be. You can see what sort of minerals are in the squares immediately next to you, but to convey what the items further away are (particularly those that are below you), the game highlights areas of interest. This is done by placing question marks in each grid block that contains something of value, but this is limited by how much you have already digged, so as you go deeper, these sections start to appear as you come closer. These typically mean rooms that have been sealed away and usually contain items of interest. For example, the one that we discovered during our session contained bookcases that we immediately broke down into materials and carted back to our mine. It's not all easy going though, as you will encounter enemies down here too, such as spiders, orcs, goblins and even evil moles.

There a number of other systems to keep you occupied. Whilst the prince is fairly useless to begin with, he can be upgraded along a number of different paths, such as a fighter, a researcher and others. The same is true, to a certain extent, of the rest of your dwarven populus; you first acquire a base dwarf or 'dwarfling' and from there you can assign them roles similar to how to you upgrade your prince. For example, you could upgrade a dwarfling to become a researcher and once you've built him a research table (remember, you build objects, not rooms), he will eventually grant you research points (although we didn't find out what you could spend those on).

Sadly our time was limited, so we didn't get enough time to really try out all of what A Game of Dwarves had to offer. Right now, Zeal's focus is on make building and the customisation of your mine as fun as possible, whilst encouraging you to go off and explore by hiding the better materials further away. The game is currently aiming for the end of this year, and will be available on Windows.

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