I accidentally drowned 50 dwarves

this game makes me want to build a private prison system

Alright, listen to me you knife eared piece of ♥♥♥♥! If you go any further with your piss stained pubic hair you call a wig, I'm gonna wreck your ♥♥♥♥ so hard you won't even be able to walk with your limp ♥♥♥♥! I'm gonna shove my foot so far up your shaven perfect little ass that your breath is gonna smell like shoe polish, then I'm gonna take that little red anal bead on your belt, and push it in your face! I'm gonna flagellate you with my ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ beard! I'm gonna build you a pair of runic mechanical balls, and use surgical precision to sew them to your groin where your manhood ought to be just so that I can kick them with my iron ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ feet, you ♥♥♥♥!

The depth is a lie, or at least not what you think. But everyone and your grandmothers dog constantly harps on about depth, so what gives?

DF is a game about dwarves where you can't even dig a hole. Ah but see you can dig out a trench and then remove the ramps and hope nobody gets stuck down there.

So eventually you have a hole, congrats, overly complicated but let's proceed with the next logical step - filling the hole in. Oh silly you, of course you can't really do that either. See dirt is just a figment of your imagination and rocks can't simply be thrown into a hole, you have to construct a proper wall to block the hole again.

Ok, all this workingaround made me hungry, let's eat some fruit - remember that fruits can't be gathered like plants where you just drag the gather tool over them, no, for fruits, on the ground or otherwise, you have to make a fruit gathering zone under a different menu. Ok cool, I got some fruit, imagine I could just let go of it from my hand and have a tree grow. You sweet summer child, go watch tree farm tutorial for 4 hours to figure out how, once again, you can accomplish such a simple mundane task IN-directly.

Heeey wait a minute, my fort is called Stinkyhead, no wonder all the dwarves are so dumb, lemme change the name. Alas, dear reader, changing the name will cost even more of your life than reading this ungodly review. See you can really only setup the name in the beginning, which means you can't pick the default start but must instead prepare for your journey "carefully". And you can't just use the default start build, oh no, you now have to manually assign 7 dwarves x 10 skills over multiple different tabs and then use points to get your starting items from a list of every single item in the game, all for the audacity of having your own name.

But what about starting my own civilization? Now that's just asking too much. My own religion? Nope and god knows I lost mine. You're gonna sit your butt into this pre-generated world and you're gonna like it.

Still feeling optimistic and high? Well your FPS won't be. Now in most games when you get later on in your build with lots of things ticking it's understandable for the game to start struggling but in DF you need to become a MS certified troubleshooting agent long before late game. See a dwarf could have taken a leak somewhere and the whole world had to recalculate the oceans to compensate for the illegal pisk. Or a horde of mobs spawned in one of the few hundred layers, out of sight, out of mind but not out of your PC resources.

Honestly the UX is abysmal and the feature set is so shallow you can't even wet your feet in it. The depth is all in the backend, it's there so that a random mole you dig into underground has the CV of a retired entrepreneur - which you can read and laugh at but not really make use of gameplay-wise. If I knew this in advance I'd never go anywhere near this game. People misleading me I can understand, but your grandmothers dog too - that one really hurt.

While a key tenet of games is to do as much as possible with as few resources, DF flips the script upside down. If you're looking for a simulation you can make truly your own, this ain't it. If instead you just want to sit back and watch the world burn after burning your PC due to hands down the most pitiful UX I have seen EVER, then grab a pick and get digging.

Y

outdated. would love a remaster though

I've played 1011 hours, what do you think?

Trully a great game, both in size and in essence.

Must have put in 2,000 hours of the pre-steam version, flooded my city, had a dragon once, dug to deep, so many memories of this game that I knew I had to pick it up on steam even if I never play it just to say thanks for the fond memories.

I'm giving this a recommendation because I love this game and believe that when a few issues are resolved, it may be the best game ever made.

Fortress mode only offers me a few gripes. Like sometimes the way things are done isn't the most intuitive and you might find yourself looking up information on basic things such as how to get you dwarves not to die of dehydration even though you have plenty of water and booze. Then there are things that honestly just add to the charm of DF like dwarves going to build a wall to block the flow of water somewhere only to build it from the wrong side and drown.

Adventure mode, my favorite way to play, needs major work however. You wouldn't think it, but this mode is *FAR* more prone to crashing than fortress. A crash is worse than death, since at least when you die, it adds to the lore of the world and you can still go read about your character's exploits in legends mode. A crash simply erases your last X amount of time played. Extremely frustrating. And unlike fortress mode, there's no auto-save feature. This is triple damning since even manual saves are sub-optimal because they split your timeline. The world after the save doesn't share the same timeline as when you save and quit game.

AM has a few other "I'm never playing this game again!" issues that *aren't* easily chalked up to needing to learn the game. Like when you think you're turning in a quest only to have the person who "gave" you the quest say "You killed so-and-so, the terrible evil thing. I was inevitable." or "You got the awesome stolen treasure we wanted back. I don't really care one way or another." I say these aren't a matter of learning the game because of just how egregiously unintuitive they are. The slaying of creatures bothering a settlement is something you simply have to go shouting in taverns and places to spread word of your deeds. Once word gets around, it improves your chances of being made a hearthperson and get actual quests from your lady/lord.

The game is good. No, it's great. It's worth the price for fortress mode alone, adventure mode is a bonus and not one that's for everyone. If you're getting this for adventure mode, you're better off to get the original game for free with the Lazy Newb pack. No mouse support and the UI is even more frustrating than the Steam version, but it's more fleshed out and more stable.