According to the advertising blurb, ‘DwarfHeim is the next generation of co-op RTS games. DwarfHeim innovates the RTS genre with thrilling co-op and team gameplay that will appeal to fans of multiplayer games everywhere.’ But is it? Does it? No. No it doesn’t, and it’s annoying in a very special way.
To set the scene, Dwarfhim is a kind of hybrid between Factorio, Age of Empires and Warcraft. You take control of a hero character that specilizes in one of three areas - mining, building or fighting - and have to work with two other players (or the AI) in PvE survival waves or PvP skirmish battles. The miner is the ‘factorio’ unit - they construct intricate networks of conveyer belts and smelters and whatnot in the underworld map to produce one half of the teams resources. The builder is the ‘AOE’ player - he constructs overland buildings like farms and lumber mills to provide the other half of the resources (as well as certain defensive structures). The warrior is... a warrior. They produce military units and run around the map right-clicking on enemies. It’s an interesting setup with a lot of potential, but ultimately tries to achieve too much and fails at everything. It’s like someone enters a triathlon, but can’t tie their own laces, needs water wings and insists on riding a tricycle.
To start with, I chose the miner because I love me some Factorio. But I soon realized that you can’t pick up and move your factory pieces - you have to destroy them and rebuild elsewhere, wasting the resources. If you destroy a belt that’s jammed up with resources, you lose the resources that were on the belt. Your units have to clamber over the factory network, but enemies can just glide right through. The tutorial doesn’t tell you about key buildings and what they’re for, leaving you to waste time figuring it all out for yourself. And what do you get for all this? Do you get some cool factory progession system where you have different tiers of autonomous production units to save yourself from tedious busywork? No - you get some different types of ingots.
Next I chose the builder, because frankly I was just bored with the miner. Instantly I felt right at home, then immediately remembered why I left in the first place. The builder is all about farms and lumbermills - the classic AOE experience. But Dwarfheim adds its own twist with beer. Apparently this is something the devs have played up - it’s an RTS with beer! - but it’s not like the beer does much aside from buff your units. They don’t get drunk or anything, which would be hilarious and interesting and might explain the numerous pathfinding bugs that plagued me during my playthrough. They just add +10 to melee attacks, or heal your units or whatever. So ultimately the builder is just doing the same things as every RTS has done since Dune 2. Build your economy, then build defensive structures, then expand, then repeat.
Finally there’s the warrior, which is an odd one to be honest. They sort of feel like the devs heard about the rule of three, then were stuck with what to actually include for the third hero. The warrior can produce military units, but so can the other two heroes, which means the actual utility of the warrior lies in their buffs. You’ve played Warcraft - you know the drill. +10 to movement speed for 20 seconds, +30 to damage against children. That sort of thing. There’s no real difference aside from the buffs between your choices of hero either - one has defensive buffs, one has offensive buffs and the other is a jack of all trades. They could have had a shaman hero with ranged magic, or some sort of lumbering oaf who moves slowly but hits like a truck, or a master assassin who could disguise troops or anything other than “this guy has a shield so he’s good at defense.”
But what of the story you ask? Are you at least investd in the fate of your dwarfy heroes? Nope - because there is no story. The game is just skirmish, survival and sandbox. Why are there dwarves even here? Who’s the bad guy? Is there a bad guy? The answer to all this is “lol idk” - which makes it pretty hard to give a damn about their survival. Plus, there’s this weird incongruence between Nordic architecture for the building and Scottich accents for all the dwarves. It’s like the devs went ”oh they’re dwarves so we’ll base them on northerners” and someone asked “wait, which north are you talking about?” and they said “lol our dwarves have beer”.
Then there are the technical issues, which are probably the real nail in the coffin here. Movement is clunky and unresposive, the pathfinding is wonky at best, units will drop out of formation to run around in circles for no reason, enemies will glitch through walls and teleport stright into you, the netcode is suboptimal meaning dropped connections abound (and that’s assuming you even get in a game to begin with) and so on and so forth. All of this is why I said Dwarfheim is annoying in a special way.
It’s so much wasted potential that it’s just galling - there could be a real niche for a game like this, that combines all these different elements from games like Factorio and AOE, but this ain’t it chief. The Factorio elements are oversimplified and completely miss the point that Factorio was all about ridding yourself of busywork in new and interesting ways. The AOE elements are missing the idea that it’s all about unit and civilization diversity - because there’s none of that here. All your clans are the same Scottish/Danish hybrids with the exact same build structure. Ultimately, the game’s in this weird position where it looks like there’s a huge sea in front of you to explore, but you dive into it and crack your jaw on the seabed and realise that the entire sea is about as deep as a puddle. It’s such a shame.
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