Dwarf Shop

A neat little game, with a tentative thumb's up. [h1]The good[/h1] [*] It does what it promises on the box - it's a li'l casual pixel game about upgrading your Dwarf Shop whilst mining and selling [*] Contains mild humour [*] There are some interesting choices to be made. Do you sell your crafted items, or put them on your dwarves to improve their stats? Who do you prioritise - your miner or crafters? [*] Rarity of items & different stats makes for interesting comparisons between what gear to use - and on which dwarf. [/list] [h1]The Mediocre[/h1] [*] The game gets a bit monotonous. One would have hoped for wider branching decision trees or more conflicts of interest. Instead, you just retreat from mining when you get low on health and craft whatever is available to craft. [*] The 'bartering' system basically means: put down a high price tag and adjust it down until it sells. Any following items will also sell at that price. [*] You need to be at the wheel for the game to progress. You can't tab out to let the miner heal or finish crafting. For such a casual game, that seems a bit restrictive. [*] You unlock the other dwarf salespeople relatively easily, but... (see below) [/list] [h1]The Bad[/h1] [*] Unlocking extra dwarves does nothing for several levels as you don't get the right resources yet. [*] Unlocking extra recipes does very little when you don't ever get the resources you need to craft those items. [*] Limited inventory space means you are constantly binning items, as you stockpile certain resources in far vaster quantities than you can get rid of them. [*] Selecting the 'for sale' button is finicky and if you're not careful when adjusting a price, a rare craft you would normally sell for $1000 sells for $9... because the game didn't bother waiting for you to finish putting in the full price of $999. [*] Quests are not aligned to level progress. By the time you finish the first few mines, your next quest is to farm Earth Tier 2... which doesn't show up for at least the next 10 levels. If ever. (I wouldn't know - not having run into it by shop level 18.) [/list] Fortunately, these points do not stop you from progressing. It just clutters up your game. It is, however, a bit frustrating to see a bunch of new items (such as new armour) you can't craft to progress more quickly with your mining - simply because you never get the associated resources. [h1]Bottomline[/h1] Truth be told, a lot of my gripes just feel like shoddy playtesting. They should be easy enough to adjust. Same with the visual bug where customers walk off with giant pixelated items. I bought the game at full price and I think it's not a bad buy at that cost (if barely). About 5 euros would probably be a fairer price in its current state, but I can see the issues mentioned above remedied easily enough.

Was looking for a good shop keeping management sim, found a pointless badly designed clicker instead. Between the clunky interface, complete lack of automation of production lines, and automation of the only aspect of the game that might have been fun to do manually (the dungeon delving), this game manages to be both a shallow failure state-void snore fest and a hectic and ultimately futile click fest to try and keep yourself from floating a billion resources and achieve the satisfying illusion of being a competent shopkeeper. Pretty much the only way to challenge yourself is to try and speed run the game, which just ain't a thing I'm into. Got bored in less than an hour and requested my refund. I can't even recommend this game for fans of clicker games because of the impossibly clunky interface. Selling anything in this game requires you to click buttons, open/close windows, drag items and type in your desired sell price for a total of at least 8 manual operations PER ITEM from the point of crafting to the point of sell, and that's in the optimal case where you're not bouncing back and forth several crafting windows at once trying to be efficient with you micro management, and when you know what your target price should be, which differs according to item, item rarity and the stats of your vendors. Seriously, as someone who finds satisfaction in perfecting a manufacturing process, this almost drove me crazy. Most other clickers get ♥♥♥♥ done in one or two clicks. That's pretty much the point of the whole genre. Each Click = Instant Satisfaction. So as a clicker game, this game is a failure in basic design, and as a management game, it lacks the depth required to make it worthwhile, and as BOTH, its bogged down by the terribly inefficient interface and tedious manual labour you're required to do to achieve each individual bit of progression. No thanks!

Kind of an alternate take on Swag and Sorcery's formula, Dwarf Shop is a straight-up shopkeeper idle-style game. There's not a whole lot to it, you send your dwarf cave diving for resources to craft weapons and sell them in hopes of hoarding enough gold to convince a dragon to move in. It sounds pretty boring, but it's oddly engaging for a good ten hours before the grind starts showing through. This is NOT an idle game such as Time Warpers, rather one you could easily play while watching a movie or something. The soundtrack for DS is indeed very nice, it's a pity they don't sell it separately. Visuals are good but the screen can at times get a little confusing as mostly everything is a varying shade of brown or gold. Controls work fine but you might find selected weapons occasionally resetting themselves when the mouse "drops" them. My one complaint would be lag that's seemingly tied into the number of customers in your shop, the higher their number and longer you play per session the more lag you'll encounter. Note older reviews clock time to completion at around eight hours, but a later rebalancing patch extends play time to between twelve and sixteen based on if you use the time speed-up options. The first 28 achievements come at a steady rate, the last two close to game completion. You *can* level your shop to the maximum of 30 if you wish, but finishing up anywhere past 20 is fine. For half off it's a good buy, but I don't see myself ever playing through this game again so you may want to take that into consideration before purchasing.