The Dwarves is an old-school role-playing game which—as you guessed—centers around the antics of a group of dwarves as they try to prevent the destruction of their stronghold. You can clearly see parallels between this story and that of The Hobbit. The narrative is quite strong even though it can get tricky at times to keep track of all the characters. Your journey starts off as a simple blacksmith but turns out to be much more as you embark on a seemingly simple quest to return a few belongings to your master’s acquaintance.
The gameplay of The Dwarves is different than most role-playing games out there. Navigating the world is also quite a unique experience. Most of the combat takes place from a top-down perspective and you automatically attack enemies with a basic swing when you get close to them. However, in order to succeed, you must use advanced moves and abilities. For example, instead of killing a bunch of enemies one at a time, try using a broad swing of your axe to knock them off a bridge. Using your abilities and the environment to your advantage when you can are important to combat. Also, managing the health of your party is important so be sure to switch your main character to make sure no one falls.
When you aren’t fighting hordes or exploring certain scenarios, the game takes place on a map. Yes, you read that right, on a map. Have many of you played Joe Dever’s Lone Wolf? It’s a text-based adventure where you have to select certain actions after reading a passage. The Dwarves handles much of its story the same way. Luckily, there’s an amazing narrator so you don’t have to read everything. You read a passage and then you have to make a few decisions. This is definitely a more old-school approach but I would’ve preferred a semi-open world to explore instead of looking at a map for half the time. So, to summarize, the game is basically a bunch of combat scenarios coupled with making decisions while placing your characters on different points of a map.
The graphics are good even though you notice a lot of blurry textures in odd areas. For example, if you go up close to certain cliffs or mountains, you can see how low-resolution the assets are. I’m not an expert in game development but the title doesn’t appear to be cutting-edge when it comes to its visuals. When other titles like Zenith—also made by a smaller team—can use high-resolution textures, why can’t The Dwarves on Xbox One? Like many games that come out on the console, this appears to be a case of poor optimization more than anything else. I think the developers just don’t have enough experience working with consoles.
The game doesn’t run that well on Xbox One. I could’ve finished this review days ago but I was waiting for the promised day-one patch to see if it made a difference. While the patch does improve performance considerably, it introduces new issues while getting rid of the horrendous stuttering. While the performance still isn’t perfect, the most obvious problem with the patch has to be how the marker to select different areas on the map appears to have a seizure when you click on it. How were these problems not caught when the developers tested the update out? The trembling markers are obviously not a game-breaking problem but make the game appear unpolished. Such basic issues should’ve been caught before the update was pushed out to customers.
Summary
Overall, The Dwarves is a good game which is elevated by its story more than its gameplay. It’s complex and the unique visual design of the characters and the great voice acting make the experience. Unfortunately, the performance problems detract from the package even after the recent update. The problem with the flickering markers on the map is another major annoyance. Hopefully the developers will fix these eventually but until then the title feels like an unoptimized game. That’s what many gamers will take away despite all of its positives.
Asher and Xian is a shared byline ICXM used for 18 articles co-authored between 2015–2017 covering game reviews, and Xbox news. See the individual contributor profiles for the writers behind these collaborations.