Thanks GamersGate for giving us this game to review!

The dwarven king is incredibly greedy and wants your team to mine the forbidden mountain to collect riches for him.  The deeper you go into the mountain, the more precious the treasures.  Unfortunately the tougher monsters lurk in the deepest depths as well.  To make matters worse, you’re not the only team mining for treasure.  Your goal is to bring the most loot to the king before you run out of turns.

The game play is easy to learn and there is some strategy involved.  When you start the game you must pick your team and starting location.  Your team consists of 5 members and you can have them be scouts, miners or fighters.  The fighters are the strongest but they can’t move very far per turn.  The miners are well rounded and the scouts are the opposite of the fighters.

 

When you start your turn, you get to build a tunnel by sliding an appropriate piece into an empty hex.  If you mess up, you can undo or you can skip adding a piece altogether.  You can use this piece to connect your tunnels or you can be a jerk and mess up your enemy’s area.  Once the piece is in place, you can then move your dwarves.

The mining spots are limited on how much you can mine out of them.  This means that you constantly have to search and go deeper to find more loot.  Besides mining, you can also get loot by attacking the roaming monsters or opposing teams.  The last source of income is discovering and redeeming treasure chests.  In order to cash out on your loot, you have to go back to your starting point or sell it to a merchant for a fee.

When you end a turn you’ll have to sit back and watch the enemy move.  You can speed up the game play but you cannot bypass watching them.  Another annoyance is that you often have to click on message boxes that don’t apply to you. One feature I’d like to see implemented would be an undo option since I have often moved a dwarf accidently.  With the limited number of movements, wasting it really stinks.

Multiplayer is available in this game but it’s limited to the same machine.  The map you choose to play on determines the number of players and turns.  The AI is pretty devious and challenging.  You can adjust the difficulty level to your liking.  Online multiplayer would be great, but this is a new developer and that would be quite an undertaking for them.

The graphics are pixilated and low res.  Although the game looks 2D, the engine used has 3D capabilities thus upping the system requirements.  Unfortunately this game does not run full screen and seems to run in a 1280x720 window.  Pressing Alt + Enter does not make the game go into full screen. Both the dwarves and enemies have unique classes and appearances.  The animations and particle effects look good.  I like how the tunnels illuminate as you travel through them.

The sound effects are relatively basic.  I wasn’t expecting much from a game that’s a little over thirty megabytes.  The voice acting is mostly mumbles but you’ll occasionally hear “For the king!” before some battles.  The background music is pleasant to listen to but it’s not very memorable.

When it comes to appropriateness this game is relatively clean.  There’s mostly greed and violence.  The monster battles aren’t super gory or drawn out.  In fact, I spent most of my time reading the king’s commentary instead of watching the battle.  The king will compliment your battle techniques when you’re winning and criticize you when you’re losing.

My biggest gripe with this game is the stability.  I have not been able to complete a game without it crashing to my desktop.  I have tried this on two different machines and even tried running it as an administrator with no success.  As of this review there are no patches available but there is one in development.  Until it\'s ready, I would recommend checking out the demo before buying this game.  The price of $5 is very reasonable but if you can’t save or complete a game I can’t recommend buying it.