So yeah, I played a little yesterday.
You are given a "world map" which has a number of levels on it. The levels get available gradually as you finish previous ones.
In the game world you are represented by a prince dwarf, which is, like with any dwarf you do not have direct control over. If prince dies the level is lost and you need to start over.
Each level has a chain of quests or objectives that you must complete in order to finish the level. In addition they are optional quests that give you additional fame (usually x1.5 of what you normally get for completing a level). Fame points can be spent on abilities of your prince, which are fairly generic, such as more starting gold for your settlement, better research speeds, and more formidable military prowess.
In game there is a spawning pool of dwarfs, that to me does not make a lot of story sense. Why would dwarfs spawn from a pool? They make some excuse that it's a teleport to the base settlement, but why the heck more then the population limit can't come through? Anyway. When a dwarf arrives he is professionless and gain levels just for mucking around eating and sleeping. When a profession assigned he start getting experience for performing his professional duties. There are 5 professions to choose from: Builder (build stuff like beds, crops, etc), Digger, Worker (tend crops and gathers food), Researcher (gives research point to spend in tech tree), and Warrior.
Tech tree resets when a level starts and to me it looks quite unimpressive. I wonder would it matter if I don't do any research at all? Perhaps on the later levels it would matter, I don't know.
You can't change a dwarfs profession once selected, but you can banish one dwarf and summon another, of course this new dwarf will start with level one. By the way apart from warriors I could not noticed much difference between low level and high level dwarf.
The game has about 10 different resources, each are supposed to be dug out from surroundings. As such resources are scarce, because mostly underground consists of mud, you get just a bit of this and a bit of that. Because of this it seems digging everything you can think of is essential. You can also plant wood-crop that will generate some "free" wood and you can exchange it for other resources but that would be terribly slow as the rate with which the wood is gathered is not that great and you are limited by fertile soul to plant it (which is also scarce) and by the number of dwarfs that can work it due to population cap.
I'll give the game a couple more levels playtime, but it does feel a bit shallow similar to the feel Settlers 6 gave to me.
What this games gave to me though, is desire to go back to
Towns and
Gnomoria, which was "too hard to get into, can't be bothered" for me.
