INTRO:
For people who are into the management subgenre of strategy games, dwarves may be the fantastical race that fascinates them the most, being the diminutive and stubborn folk with plenty of facial hair that they are. There had been many games that feature them as the titular stars. A Game of Dwarves, or "AGOD" for short (an acronym that is also used by the developer), is one such title.
AGOD's most boasted feature is 3-D mining, and it certainly delivers on this feature. However, everything else about it, including the dwarves themselves, can seem typical, boring and so much simpler in comparison.
PREMISE:
The game is set in a fantastical world in which there were dwarves who are trying to raise a glorious civilization, as is typical of dwarves. After having overcome so many challenges, establishing many strongholds across the continent that they lived on and forming friendships with the draconic and elven races, it would seem that the Dwarves are well set for a golden age.
Those dreams ended when they came across the hooded sorcerous creatures known as the Mages. Refusing to establish any relations outright, the Mages unleashed a war against the Dwarves and their allies. Being poorly equipped to fight against the sorcery that the mages can wield, the Dwarves lost ground very quickly, and their allies were either exterminated or fled to safer lands.
Eventually, the onslaught mysteriously stopped, but the Dwarves were driven back to their original underground city of Hemfort.
Fast-forward to many years later, there are few Dwarves left who remember what they have lost; one of them is the Dwarven monarch, King Father, the oldest dwarf alive. He happens to have a young and lazy son for an heir, and this character happens to be the one that the player will take the role of (though the player would have an impression that he is not doing much work).
The prince was sent on an expedition to reclaim the Dwarves' lost territories and treasures, starting with the province closest to Hemfort. The Prince is certainly reluctant and fearful at first. Yet, the innate practicality, stubbornness and glory-hungry pride of the dwarven race would eventually occur even for him, thus giving him the urge to forge onward, but also towards those who orchestrated the fall of the Dwarves in the first place.
Unfortunately, this otherwise decent, if unoriginal, story were held back by underwhelming presentation and more importantly, dull and repetitive gameplay.
LEVELS - OVERVIEW:
In any game session, the player is given a procedurally generated level to work with. This level has limited horizontal dimensions, but its verticality is tremendously considerable in comparison. The player's progress through the session will practically be measured in how deep the player has gone under; there will be more on how to get deeper later.
It is from the level that the player will gain the resources needed to build the stronghold that is needed to support the presence of the player's dwarves in the level, who in turn are needed to explore further into it.
There are obstacles and challenges along the way, but a competent player would soon figure out that they are not really too difficult once he/she has discovered certain exploits and reliable strategies – some of which were revealed by the publishers and developers themselves in their own development diaries.
LEVELS – PROCEDURAL GENERATION:
Any level in the game is procedurally generated. This means that any playthrough with a level, even in the story campaign, would have the level being seemingly different from what it would be in another playthrough.
However, there are certain similarities in all these different versions of the same level. One of these is the amount of resources in the level. For some game modes, the player can set the average amount of resources in a level, the density of resources and the percentage of each type of resources, among other things such as the presence and power of enemies. In the case of the campaign levels, these are already pre-determined.
The game, however, scatters these around the level, so the player may have to spend some time searching around to find out exactly where they are.
DIGGING:
Digging is what the player will be doing the most. However, not all dwarves can dig, which is perhaps not in keeping with the fantastical stereotype.
Only dwarves that have gone on the career of the simply-named "digger" can dig, and only so upon the orders of the player. Players who have had experience with Dungeon Keeper and Dwarf Fortress would be familiar with how to issue dig orders; the player only needs to click on blocks that the player wants removed and the diggers will come over via the shortest route to have them dug out.
The player does not need to worry about the removal of debris from blocks that have been broken down; it simply disappears.
Blocks that the player has cleared cannot be refilled; this is an unfortunate restriction. Although one can argue that the sources of inspiration for this game, such as Dungeon Keeper, did not allow the replacement of blocks that have been removed, this is a lost opportunity to make the game more sophisticated.
Dwarf diggers are also the only ones that can dig; no other person or creature can. This means that the player does not need to worry about enemies digging into his/her domain, but this also means that AGOD does not offer the challenge that the games that inspired it had.
Diggers, like other dwarves with different careers, gain experience as they perform their jobs over time. As to be expected of a typical system of experience, experience that is gained goes into progress towards attaining a level for a dwarf. A high-level digger generally digs faster than a low-level one, but he does not appear to have any other benefits.
Diggers who dug blocks beneath them will perform a comical falling animation, which is funny at first. However, the player will soon notice that if they dug into large caves or rooms, they will perform that animation for every level that they have to drop.
The player cannot do much to retrieve them when this happens – even the teleportation feature will not work as only dwarves on solid ground can be teleported. The player will have to wait for them to complete the drop. Fortunately, or conveniently, the dwarf does not incur any damage from the fall.
DEPTH LEVELS:
The player can only focus on one level of depth at any one time. Considering that some maps can be many levels deep, it is fortunate that there is a handy meter at one corner of the screen that shows the level of depth that the player is looking at. Using the meter and changing depths, the player can also see how deep a map can be.
The player can also check out the surface, but other than critters that are roaming around as low-level fodder for the player's soldiers and the prince, there is nothing else worthy of interest. The trees on the surface cannot be harvested for wood and the rocks cannot be mined, among other things that the player cannot do on the surface.
Anyway, the significance of depth levels is that as the player goes deeper, there are more veins, seams and pockets of resources to be found among the otherwise useless blocks. There are also nastier monsters to be found, usually in hollowed out pockets in the map that will be elaborated on later.
Most importantly, the different levels of depth are categorized into blocks of different toughness. At first, there is just soil to deal with close to the surface, but eventually the player will encounter (relatively) soft stratified rock, craggy rocks and harder, denser kinds of earth.
The harder kinds of earth take significantly more effort to mine, so the player may want to hang back in the upper levels to gain enough diggers, nurture them and upgrade them before venturing deeper below, or otherwise waste a lot of time watching the dwarves hack away almost uselessly.
HOLLOW AREAS:
As the dwarves dig through a map, the player may come across blocks that have yet to be revealed in the blackness of the underground but have question mark symbols floating in them. The question marks denote that these blocks are hollow and actually make up a cave or room.
There are often enemies in these hollows, which can seem inexplicable. Regardless, the possible presence of hostile creatures in these places means that the player would have to approach them with caution. On the other hand, such places often hold goodies that can be sold off to make up for shortages of resources that the player wants.
For example, the player may come across what appears to be a storage room for cannons and munitions. Although these things are ultimately useless, they can be sold off in return for iron and obsidian.
Unfortunately, these hollowed out places are also reminders of many lost opportunities for the developer to make their game more sophisticated than it is. Returning to the example of the storage room, the cannons and munitions may have strongly suggested that there were plans to have artillery in the game, but ultimately these are just vendor trash, to borrow a term from the RPG genre for useless junk that have worth only when sold.
These also give a strong impression that much of the artists' work has been wasted.
TELEPORTATION:
Dwarves can be quite slow on the move, so the game has a tool that allows the player to pick up and drop dwarves elsewhere. It may seem handy, but its implementation can seem shaky.
Firstly, there appears to be little story-based explanation for this tool, other than the usual answer that conveniently mentions the involvement of magic. Secondly, the tool can only pick up to five dwarves, which can seem measly. Finally, once all dwarves have been dropped, the tool is temporarily disabled.
Such designs strongly suggest that the tool was implemented late into the game's development, and not wholeheartedly either.
MINERALS:
The mineral resources of the earth are perhaps the best reason and incentive for the player to excavate away. Emptying the belly of the earth of its riches can be very addictive, and the game certainly feeds into this addiction. Among clusters of several blocks or so, there will be some resources of one sort or more, which may have players with such addictions clicking away more than they would expect.
The player does not need to worry about carting mined minerals away to storage or to the treasury; this is done automatically, conveniently enough. There is, however, a lost opportunity to implement a transport system for minerals and the dwarves that would ferry them about. Considering that dwarves can only move about via their typical dwarfish waddle, some method of transportation for them and the minerals that they love so much would have been very welcome.
The resources that are found close to the surface tend to be unexciting, but they are still needed to create the early-stage assets that the player needs to establish the presence of the dwarves. Of these, silver ore is the most appreciated, as it is immediately converted to cold hard cash that the player needs to buy many things.
Other early-stage resources include good old stone, which the player will use to construct items in lieu of wood, which is another early-stage resource but which is not as abundant as stone early on.
Once the player gets deeper into a map, he/she will come across veins of gold, which yields more cash. There are also rarer resources to be found, such as iron. Eventually when the player reaches the rockier depths, there are far more valuable materials, such as obsidian and titanium.
There are several other minerals that would not be mentioned here for fear of spoilers. However, although the many different minerals may greatly appeal to players who are enamoured of dwarves and their predilection for fantastical materials, this appeal is fleeting. In fact, it is likely to evaporate completely when the player realizes how limited the options to utilize them for are.
This will be elaborated via some examples. As one, dreadstone, a late-stage mineral, would not appear to be functionally different from stone. It can be used to build the same types of things that stone can be used to build, with the only difference that the resulting things are better at what they do than things made of stone. However, there are very few other ways to utilize dreadstone, a realization of which can sap away the excitement of finding this very rare mineral.
As another example, titanium is little more than an upgrade over iron, which is used to create items that are associated with soldier dwarves.
These rarer late-stage minerals do happen to be needed to promote basic combat dwarves into more advanced ones. However, that they have little other uses would disappoint players who know some fiction about fantastical materials and alchemy.
CROPS & WORKERS:
One would wonder how the dwarves get wood and food in this game, considering their tendency to make homes underground. The surface does have trees, but they could not be harvested in any way; neither do the dwarves grow anything on the surface.
Instead, they get food and wood from the underground, which can seem incredulous.
The underground, oddly enough, has blocks of fertile soil, even though these are usually located at the surface in the real world.
Anyway, plots of plants can be planted on top of these blocks to grow crops. As for the issue of crops not getting sunlight underground, the game has magical stones that can be placed near these crops and somehow allow the latter to grow without sunlight.
Such designs give a very strong impression that the game designers have exploited the fantastical settings to make more than a few decisions of convenience to overcome the issue of sustenance for dwarves.
Anyway, some dwarves can be directed to pursue the career of the "worker". Workers have to be assigned to the aforementioned stones so that they will harvest the crops that grow near these stones. The player cannot set their harvesting priorities, though they will clear mature crops whenever possible. They harvest crops more quickly as they become more experienced.
Unfortunately, the harvesting work will also reveal a problem to the observant player. Dwarves can only interact with something if it is on or in a block adjacent to them. Anything else that they cannot reach cannot be worked on.
This would not have been an issue if there had been warnings that Workers cannot reach a certain plot of plants, but there is not any to be had, so the inexperienced player will have to learn about this the hard way after having wasted wood and gold to place crops that Workers cannot get to.
Crops do not continuously yield harvests. Eventually, they have to be replanted, though when this has to happen is not certain. In fact, this is a matter of luck, though the consequences of bad luck and good luck are fortunately quite subtle when it comes to when crops have to be replanted, as long as the player has been watching the expenditure rates.
Conveniently, the game will automatically replant crops, but the costs for replanting will also be automatically incurred. Therefore, the player may want to consider having some plots of basic crops at any one time, as these are cheap to replant.
There are seemingly many kinds of crops that the player can plant, but ultimately, these differences are only figuratively shallow. This is because there are only two major types of crops: those that yield food, and those that yield wood. The fancier (and more expensive) crops may yield more than the basic ones and contribute to the happiness of the dwarves, which will be described later, but otherwise they do nothing else.
There are many lost opportunities to make farming in AGOD more sophisticated than just plonking down crops where Workers can reach them and waiting for the wood and food to come in.
WOOD & FOOD:
Wood and food are the only renewable resources. Wood is the basic resource that is needed to build many things, but wooden things generally do not impress dwarves and thus do not contribute to their happiness.
Food is needed to feed the dwarves, of course; starving dwarves are not only unhappy dwarves, but they are also dead dwarves if the player neglects them long enough.
The dwarves would seem to eat a lot, especially to players that are experienced in management games where digital people have to be fed. Therefore, the inexperienced player would eventually learn that getting food is the first order of the day (pun not intended) when starting a new map.
The system of food, however, can cause a lot of disbelief. Although the dwarves are deriving food from crops, their feast tables appear to have meat-based dishes. This oddity is not as strange as the feast tables themselves.
Feast tables are the only place where dwarves can eat; they cannot bring food with them. There are several types of feast tables, but all of them are functionally the same. The only differences between them are that the fancier tables contribute more to happiness, and some of them are a bit smaller than the rest.
Anyway, there are dishes on the feast tables as long as there is food in the player's accounts. The number of dishes on the feast tables is a good indicator of how much food is left. However, strangely enough, there is no one to prepare the food, cook the dishes and bring these to the tables; the dishes simply pop onto the tables.
Of course, the game designers have mentioned in developer diaries that this was done to simplify the gameplay, but the disbelief that such a convenient design cause can be too much for some people.
STORAGE:
The player can have many blocks of fertile soil for crops and found many seams of minerals, but the player needs to have the storage space to hold all their yields.
The player always starts with some storage space, but eventually the player will need more to hold the resources that he/she would be getting. This can be done by building chests, cabinets or similar furniture. Otherwise, any excess resources that are gathered are wasted outright. The only warning that the player has about this is that the numeral indicator for the resource will turn green.
Conveniently, the player does not have to designate which container holds which resource. However, if the player is already hurting for storage space, any container that is lost for whatever reason will cause stored resources to be lost.
It just so happens that some enemies target containers instead of dwarves first, so the player may want to have some spare space just in case.
SCHOLARS & TECH TREE:
Dwarves can be directed to pick the career of the Scholar. Scholars spend their time at research tables to accumulate research points. Research points can be spent to unlock entries in the tech tree, which grant benefits such as upgrades to the capabilities of certain dwarves and more things that can be built.
The entries in the tech tree are categorized into four tiers. First tier entries require one point each to be unlocked, second tier entries require two and so on. Therefore, the player may need to have several scholars to generate the points needed to unlock the higher tier entries, or at least nurture and promote some of them so that they can be faster at generating points.
Unfortunately, whatever technology that the player has unlocked in one level in the campaign cannot be brought over to another one. Having to research technologies all over again can seem rather repetitive.
Of course, one can argue that if unlocked technologies can be brought over to other levels, there would be gameplay balance issues. After all, some of them can be very potent, such as upgrades for the diggers.
HEALTH, HUNGER & FATIGUE:
There are three statistics that determine a dwarf's survivability.
Health of course indicates how close a dwarf is from death when exposed to physical harm. Reduced health will eventually recover over time, especially if the dwarf heals and rests, but otherwise there is not any other way to heal. Therefore, the player may want to be careful about which soldier dwarf to commit to battle.
Hunger is perhaps the most important statistic. After all, although dwarves can escape from threats and sleep on the floor, they cannot run away from their stomachs. There are visual indicators for when dwarves are starving, as well as voice-overs that clearly mention that they are hungry; clicking on the visual indicators allows the player to send the camera over to them, so that they can be rescued. If the player neglects them outright, they will die, of course.
Getting terribly fatigued won't kill a dwarf, but he will move about much more slowly. If he is at the brink of utter exhaustion, he just falls down on the ground to take a quick nap, but this will not reduce fatigue by much. In other words, his productivity would skydive as much of his activity would be interrupted by naps.
Dwarves that are doing things other than milling about would become hungry and tired quicker than idle dwarves, so the player might want to have feast tables near where they work. This means that the player would have to create new rooms to hold tables and beds as the dwarves get deeper into a map, which is an act that while wise, is quite rote too.
ENEMIES:
The dwarves will eventually come across enemies as they dig into the map, usually at hollowed areas. If the player has dug into these areas via the same level of depth and there is a clear path into the dwarves' domain, they will immediately attack the dwarves and/or their assets.
A clever player would approach these hollow areas or other areas with enemies from where they cannot have a clear path into the dwarves' hold. However, they do not tire or hunger, so the player cannot wait for them to die off.
Besides, these enemies will threaten the player sooner or later, even if the player attempts to seal them off. After some time (it is not certain how long), they will teleport themselves into the dwarves' homes at seemingly random places, but where they will almost always get to cause trouble.
The higher the level of an enemy, the nastier and tougher it generally is.
There are seemingly many kinds of enemies, but almost all of them fight in close combat in one way or another, which can seem underwhelming. There are special boss-like enemies – as marked by ominous pentagrams that flit about their feet - that can spawn minions, but the spawning rates appear to be completely random.
COMBAT:
Unfortunately, combat in AGOD can seem rote. It also has elements of fickle luck and issues on how soldier dwarves engage enemies.
Before elaborating this, it has to be said that the player will have to direct dwarves to follow a military career. Rookie soldiers and their promoted variants are the only dwarves besides the prince that can fight; the others simply run away screaming when enemies come around.
Initially, the rookies are just lightly equipped soldiers. Eventually, they can be promoted to better forms, eventually branching out into four different types of soldiers: a ranged one that can pile shots on a single target, another ranged one that tosses bombs to hit multiple enemies (there is no friendly fire, conveniently enough), a melee powerhouse that exchanges some hitpoints for higher damage output, and another melee powerhouse that attacks slowly but can take a lot of damage (and which happens to draw more aggression from enemies).
Sadly, that is the extent of the sophistication of the dwarves' military capabilities, at least for the launch version of the game.
When enemies come over, combat dwarves will automatically go towards the nearest enemy and attack them. This is unfortunately not a straight-forward matter. The melee dwarves mill about enemies and will have to work to get their attention, an act which is not only silly to look at but can also be distressing, especially if said enemies are wrecking important assets.
This is not as bad as how ranged soldiers engage enemies. Ranged soldiers start battle by finding a proper distance from enemies, which can take too much time. The game designers have noticed this, but their corrective measures can cause quite a lot of disbelief: once the ranged soldiers have obtained their preferred firing range, they will fire away – regardless of line of sight and their facing. Their shots will go through any obstacle in the way, even blocks of earth and rock.
Luck is the only factor that determines whether the dwarves' attacks land on target or not. Of course, one can argue that the probability of a dwarf hitting its target is influenced by its level, but probabilities are ultimately a matter of luck anyway. Terribly bad luck can have the player watching high-level soldiers somehow missing strike after strike and taking a lot of unacceptable damage in return.
That the game has the feature of critical hits would not please players who despise luck-based gameplay either.
DWARFLINGS:
One of the most unbelievable and silly aspects of AGOD is, perhaps to the detriment of the game, made apparent to the player very early on.
All dwarves are born at the capital of Hemfort, and then are sent elsewhere on missions. This is how the player would get recruits, who enter via the teleportation portal that ostensibly connects the player's holdings to Hemfort. The player can only have a limited number of dwarves at any one time, but the player can raise this limit by sending gifts of money back to Hemfort.
More importantly, the player can request replacement dwarves from Hemfort. These replacements are always level 1 Dwarflings, so any progress that a recently deceased or dismissed dwarf has obtained down his career is permanently lost.
This may have made for a challenging game, but the game designers have decided that this would be too much for players and thus have implemented a system that can seem little more than molly-coddling to sadomasochistic players.
The dwarflings do nothing but eat, sleep and wander about. In fact, of all dwarves, they eat the most. Yet, they gain experience anyway, supposedly by watching older dwarves do their work. However, this is just a flimsy excuse concocted by the game designers for this convenient design; they gain experience even when they are on their lonesome in some isolated room deep in the dwarves' holdings.
On the other hand, the dwarflings are undeniably convenient to have around. When they are converted to other dwarves, they retain their levels; this is most convenient when the player needs to have replacement soldiers. However, promoting dwarves still costs resources, so an unscrupulous player cannot abuse this feature too much.
HAPPINESS:
There are two bars and a face of a dwarf on the user interface that serves as visual indicators of the happiness of the dwarves under the player's control.
The happiness of the dwarves, as depicted by the face and the yellow bar, determines their productivity and how quickly dwarflings arrive when requested. The happier they are, the better these two statistics would be. To elaborate, productive dwarves appear to have faster animations (such as for diggers) or higher rates of output (such as for workers).
The happiness of the dwarves greatly depends on how much decoration that the player has made for their holdings and how well the player has met their needs, e.g. their desire to work, hunger and sleep.
However, before elaborating on this, it has to be said here that the dwarves' holdings are practically any space that the player has excavated or discovered in the map. This means that as the player digs up more and more of the level but neglects to decorate the space that has been uncovered, happiness will drop.
Therefore, to keep happiness up, the player would need to have crafter dwarves create the necessary objects to fulfill their needs, such as beds and feast tables. The player also needs to have the majority of dwarves doing something to occupy themselves, as boredom leads to unhappiness quickly.
Juggling the need to dig more into map to uncover riches and spending the riches to keep the dwarves happy would have been quite entertaining, at least until the wily and observant player discovers that decorating things is the easiest way to keep them happy.
To be even more frank, the player does not even need to place things like furniture and other things that crafters have to make. Instead, it is easier to just plonk down floor and wall tiles, for which crafters are not needed. Besides, tiles are a lot cheaper than other forms of decoration.
Once this exploit, which the developers have never seen fit to address, has been discovered by the player, a lot of the fun from managing happiness would be sucked out.
TRAPS AND DOORS:
AGOD has traps and doors that the player can build to help manage any incursions. They do certainly work once the player has figured out the controls to handle them, e.g. the controls to unlock or lock doors.
However, the observant player would notice that they are not necessarily at all. This is because incursions by enemies that have escaped from their confinements within the earth can be dealt with by not giving them direct access to the rest of the map and flooding them with combat dwarves before they teleport away.
Some other incursions are random occurrences where enemies spawn into the map at random places, thus making doors and traps quite useless against these enemies.
Furthermore, the need to power traps by building generators would give the impression that the gameplay potential of the mechanism of power generation has been wasted; at this time of writing, the generators only power traps, but nothing else.
CAMPAIGN, THE PRINCE & PROGRESSION:
Throughout the single-player campaign, the player will have to build and nurture bases and their occupants practically from scratch. In any mission, the Prince must survive.
The only convincing sense of progression that the player would have comes from the improvements for the Prince. As the player completes the primary and secondary objectives in the more than a dozen missions in the campaign, the prince gains favour that can be spent on improving his combat prowess or his privileges to faster research, better economy or more military advantages.
It is worth noting here that some but not all objectives in a mission can be achieved without completing the mission at all. The player would not be able to progress in the game, but can reap the rewards of favour anyway and continue or retry the mission afterwards with more advantages.
The Prince can also gain special gear, usually via optional missions that do not leads toward the conclusion of the campaign. These generally improve his combat prowess further.
The Prince can be moulded into a close combat powerhouse that can see off a lot of early threats, but of course, the player will have to consider the risks of sending him into battle.
SAVING:
For a strategy game on the computer platform, AGOD does not have a versatile game-saving system.
There can ever only be one game-save for any map; the player cannot have multiple game-saves for different moments within the same map. This is not an issue if the player is careful and does not take risks without having prepared contingency measures, of course, but other kinds of players would be utterly ruined if they released a powerful creature from confinement that his/her combat dwarves cannot deal with or suffer other similar mishaps.
GRAPHICS & STABILITY:
AGOD is not a game that would push the limits on computing resources. Opting for very simple polygons, textures and a cartoonish artstyle, the game is intended for a wide age range of players and has low computing requirements.
However, the launch version of the game was not very stable and can crash easily if the player has cleared many blocks in any map, Frame rates can plummet when the player is looking at many floors and objects, usually after having expanded his/her base from mineral veins that have been exhausted. The launch version of the game also becomes unstable after the player has played for more than two hours, after having cleared a lot of the map for space and resources.
Patches have corrected these problems, but it would diminish the impression that the game was not polished by its release date.
The surface level looks terribly dull with its lack of believable ground cover and ugly polygons that pass off as trees, though this is not a major issue as there is little to do on the surface.
The textures for underground blocks are completely flat, regardless of the material that the block is made of. This may have been intentional, because there are obviously many blocks in the game such that if the textures were any more sophisticated, the strain on the player's computer would have been too much.
The dwarves, being the titular stars of the game, can seem a bit disappointing to players who had been expecting more visual variety from them. Although dwarves of different careers certainly have different clothing and gear, they have the same pointy ears, blue eyes and orange hair, among other similarities that do not reflect well on their genetic pedigree. They do, however, look adorable, which is exactly what the designers wanted.
There is little in the way of lighting and shadowing in the game. Shadows are all blobs and light sources do not cast shadows in believable ways. Light sources do somewhat brighten their surroundings, but there is not much need for illumination anyway because just about everything is well-illuminated, even if they are deep underground. In other words, light sources are just there to look pretty.
The animations are just as simple as the rest of the graphics. The dwarves have most of the animations, though that this is not actually saying much.
They have believable animations for working, but the objects that they are working on do not appear to be animated in response. Instead, the objects have sudden transitions, such as blocks disappearing and turning into rubble. This lack of animations is most jarring when the dwarves eat, where they appear to just bring things to their mouths, from where crumbs drop.
There are also jarring transitions for sleeping animations. A dwarf would walk up to a bed, disappear, reappear somewhere above the bed in a diving animation, hit the bed face-first and disappear again, and finally reappear on the bed, lying down on their back while snoring.
There are fewer animations for non-dwarves. They only have three major animations: moving, fighting and dying. Even so, the last set of animations tends to fail, e.g. their models promptly disappear upon death, with only the puff of green gas to signify their demise.
There are no animations for the climbing of ladders whatsoever. Considering that ladders will feature prominently in the dwarves' holdings, that character models simply slide up and down them and off and onto the level that they want to go to speaks of laziness on the part of the animators.
Sometimes, the moving animations for any character would fail, causing them to look like they are sliding across terrain when they move.
There are plenty more deficiencies in the graphics for the game, but it should suffice to say that the game's visual designs are hardly adequate, much less exciting.
WRITING & VOICE OVERS:
If one had followed the development of the game, he/she would know that Zeal Game Studios is the developer of AGOD. It happened to have made a frustrating and small but still fun game about dwarves (who happen to have the same art designs).
Unfortunately, AGOD would show that Zeal Game Studios is not up to the task of making a bigger game and that its forte is in writing, yet even in this it is just barely decent.
There are voice-overs for a few characters, but all of them are whimsical and inconsequential and do not enunciate what the characters are actually saying (which they do via text boxes).
The voice-overs for enemies are often recycled for the same categories of enemies. For example, all orcs will have the same deep growling voice, even though there are a few types of orcs.
The best voice-overs would have been those for combat dwarves, but because they also utter the same shouts and yells during training, they can be rather aggravating to listen to.
There are also flaws in how the writing depicts the progress of the player in developing the Prince. For example, his inherent cowardice shows through conversations with other people, but it does not exactly match his close combat prowess, if the player has focused on improvements to his combat capabilities.
As for the writing itself, the game tries to make use of the backstory of the fall of the dwarves to inject some intrigue and suspense into the story. However, the end result appears to give the impression that the backstory is used as little more than excuses to send the prince on yet another quest. There is some character development, especially for the Prince as he grows more confident and bolder, but otherwise the writing is mainly there for attempts at amusement.
SOUND EFFECTS & MUSIC:
The audio designs of the game are at least the better part of the game's aesthetics.
There are few musical soundtracks in the game, but these are at least pleasant to listen to. The soundtrack for the main menu, in particular, is quite exciting to listen to, though it certainly does not reflect the lack of excitement in the gameplay.
The game does not have diverse sound effects, but whatever sound effects there are in this game are handy aural indicators for important occurrences. One particular sound effect that the player would appreciate is the chime that sounds when a research point has been generated. As unlocking technologies as soon as possible would be advantageous to the player, this aural indicator is certainly convenient.
CONCLUSION:
A Game of Dwarves can be a terrible disappointment to people that has fond experiences with the games that inspired its designs. It may have functional digging in three dimensions, which is very rare in computer games, but it does not offer enough challenge and sophistication to make good use of its settings.