mumble mumble
So yeah.. the game is kind of cute but has 2 major design flaws 3 if you consider "cute" a design flaw ;P
1) The dwarf AI and sometimes pathfinding is stupid as hell. They go back to get sleep, their hunger goes down, they go to work, arrive, turn around, go back to eat.. their energy goes down.. you get the idea. It is so absurd that you have to cheese with teleport spell all the time. They also only eat to 100 points (the max is 200 points) so if they arrive with 20 they have 120.. which goes down before they arrive their work place. This gets MUCH worse the longer the game goes on, because dwarves also would rather go to a bed 60 screens away than the one right in front of em...
2) The economy is based on mining finite ore which is very very far spread, there are no ore veins, there are chunks (ala native minecraft) and if you think Stone is easy to come by in this game, apparently dwarfs dig through mud here, stone is nearly as rare as money or iron (which is even more rare). Which means it is VERY finite. One wrong step and you are dead. Because if your highest skilled warriors die, you have to restart with level 1 guys that you have to level up, which costs ore and to train them, you need money. The economy has thus a major "dead-end" design flaw.
Besides that, Dungeon Keeper 2 is still the superior game, far far superior. The problem is mainly that because you have levels like in Dwarf Fortress but a 3d view you only see the walls facing you, that means you can potentially miss 50% of the ore and stuff in the walls because it is not displayed unless you rotate like crazy. This is fine in a game like DF where you had a top-down view, but in a 3d-game this is horrible. Especially because there are no actual in-between floors, to have a floor, you need to literally skip an entire level, and because you can't rotate the camera to look UP you can not tell whether there is anything in the floor above you unless you have the same area dug up from above. You basically end up digging a huge chasm downwards hoping to get any ore, because any complicated tunnel networks mean you have to move your base foward. Which means enemies can get faster there, and destroy things.
Also, that a game made in 2012 can not manage to duplicate the great room system of Dungeon Keeper 2 is telling. This game has no room allocation system (which I consider one of the greatest features of both DK2 and DF) neither are there real stockpiles in the sense. This is basically really dumbed down.. worth the 7.50$ if you buy via GMG maybe, but also buggy. The doors in this game currently are broken (don't build em ,p)
