We Are The Dwarves

My spreadsheet instincts told me this one would click: three distinct unit types, separate skill trees, an Active Pause system for queuing commands mid-combat, and an enemy AI that reacts to sight, sound, and scent. On paper, We Are The Dwarves is exactly the kind of small-scale real-time tactics game that deserves a cult following. In practice, it sits somewhere between genuinely rewarding and deeply frustrating, and which side of that line you land on depends almost entirely on your patience threshold. The setup is one of the more original premises in the genre. The dwarven universe is solid stone rather than empty space - civilizations carve out hollows around magical Stone Stars that provide heat and light. When the home star begins to die, three astronaut-dwarves are sent drilling into the unknown to find a new one. Forcer handles ranged work with a shotgun that can blast enemies off ledges and a sniper mode for longer shots - later upgrades add a mortar-style arc shot and a diversionary lure. Smashfist is a melee berserker who gets up close with a rage that enemies genuinely want to avoid. Shadow is the assassin, cycling between stealth kills and precision archery. Each has a separate skill tree that also covers spacesuit upgrades - flashlight, health regeneration, and gear that compounds in usefulness across the 18-level campaign split into two acts. The Active Pause is the genuinely good idea at the center of all this. Hitting the spacebar slows time nearly to a stop, letting you chain abilities, track cooldowns, and line up Forcer's straight-line shots before the chaos resumes. It is the mechanic that should be the game's signature strength, and in the moments it works - luring a mob to a ledge and blasting them into the void, or cycling a precisely timed stealth assassination into a berserker rush - it absolutely delivers. The problem is those moments are less common than they should be. Level design is narrow and constrictive, and the game largely wants you to find the one correct sequence rather than improvise. Die, observe nothing useful, reload from checkpoint, repeat. That is not the feedback loop of a quality tactics game - it is the loop of a puzzle with the solution hidden behind a wall. Post-launch patches did address some of the worst launch-state problems. A March 2016 update improved dwarf durability, added an easier mode, and fixed performance issues around cutscenes. The Steam all-time rating has climbed to mostly positive territory as a result, which suggests the current build is meaningfully better than what critics reviewed. Console players, though, have consistently reported worse experiences - the Xbox version in particular has drawn complaints about control friction and performance, and the PC version remains the clear way to play. Mac support also has a hard ceiling with macOS Catalina and above being unsupported, so Linux or Windows are your stable options. Co-op is present and community voices highlight it as a replayability driver - coordinating the three distinct dwarves with another player adds a strategic layer that solo play can only partially replicate. Who is this for, realistically? If your reference points are the old Commandos series - tight isometric maps, deliberate movement, enemies that punish any mistake - you will recognize the DNA here and probably tolerate the friction better than most. If you want the permissive, multi-path decision space of an X-COM or a Desperados, this is not that game. The world-building is genuinely rich and the visual atmosphere is strong, with cave environments built around careful light and colour contrast. But the tutorial does not explain the controls fully, the difficulty spikes feel designed rather than tuned, and the voice acting lands flat against what is otherwise an interesting setting. At a Metacritic of 60 and a mixed critical consensus, this is a case where the ceiling is high and the floor is genuinely low - approach with appropriate caution and the correct difficulty setting from the start. Diego, Scout Team

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