Craft The World

I would not advise buying this game. It is clearly designed with touch screens in mind and feels clunky when used with a mouse and keyboard. The AI is terrible, selecting dwarves who are totally unsuited to the task that is asked of them and using dwarves from the wrong side of the map rather than the ones right next to the point you need them. the monster attacks are just plain boring and annoying, interrupting the flow of digging and building without giving anything back. Talking of building, the only way to build is to hand direct one dwarf to do the major work and then get the rest of the tribe to fill in the blanks since if you tell them to build and let them get on with it they totally screw it up and are unable to finish the simplest of tasks. The multi-player is not what I expected. I had hoped to build a world with my brother, as we did on Terraria many times over, and instead I find I have to play it on my own and we can occasionally join up in special 'biomes'. To get to that point you need to craft a special portal and use a spell on it. Why the developers decided on this totally awful system rather than a normal server screen or other method of linking up I will never know! All that aside, if you are looking for a casual game then this might be for you. If you are looking for a good game you can play with friends, this is not it!

The description and pictures might lead you to believe that this game is side-scrolling Dwarf Fortress with some Terraria mixed to it. That is, sadly, not. It starts of as fun with crafting, mining, spellcasting and fighting, and I had fun... For about 4 hours. Then I start to realize that the game really is pretty shallow and lacks any complexity. Did you have fun managing your dwarves in Dwarf Fortress (or maybe totally-not-dwarves in Gnomoria)? Setting individual professions, managing their resources and so on? You'll not find anything like this in this game. You just designate jobs and game will pick a dwarf that will do it (at random, or it at least often seems that way). Only think you can do is to equip your minions with some items like tools, weapons and armour. That's all. Crafting seems also pretty linear and base building is just... well kind of... meh. You really don't have to think too much about best layout, optimal routes and all that difficult stuff. Fighting is repetitive and you soon realize that it is just "send all your dwarves to bash a wave of monsters... do it again in a little while...". That there is magic... Again, interesting in theory until you realize that you can just teleport your dwarves anywhere on the map and hey-not ever have problems with resource gathering ever again. Controls are also clearly made with touchscreens in mind and are unnecessarily fiddly with mouse and keyboard. Well, I could go on and on, but to wrap things up - there is no complex gameplay, no advance concepts and little to none management options. This game is NOT "Dwarf Fortress in graphics", and not even "Terraria with dwarves". It is casual touchscreen ported game, with pretty graphics and building dwarves. If that is what you are looking for, you might be entertained, just don't expect depth and complexity. All in all, nice (if average) game for a mobile phone or tablet, subpar on PC.

i love base building games. i played through the 4 campaign maps (about 80 hours). it's not dwarf fortress (DF). but that doesn't mean is worse - it's different and alot more user-friendly. i usually don't like games that have been designed for console or tablets, but in this case it doesn't feel that way. the UI is easy to use and functional. you build your home underground, mining resources and using them to craft items. by doing so you gain experience and unlock better items. the tech tree is really large and motivating, though for some techs you need to craft items that you don't really need and that's a bit annoying. you start with one dwarf, and get more as you gain more experience. getting to 6-7 dwarves is quite fast, then it becomes slower. at the end of the maps i usually have about 12-14. there's a goal (tough the game doesn't tell you) and that's alot more motivating than DF. the low number of dwarves, it gives you the "everyone counts" feeling. dwarves also get exp for the things they're doing, but i didn't notice a difference between a novice and a master. if a dwarf dies, you get a replacement 5 minutes later, so you just lose the exp. contrary to DF you find better resources as you dig deeper, which is also motivating. you will also encounter dangers down there, though they are not a serious problem, but interesting. during nighttime, a few monsters attack, and every 45 mins you get a big monster attack of increasing difficulty. this does get repetitive, but not more than the attacks in DF or other similar games. i've played well over 100 hours DF and this is the closest i've found (i also liked Rimworld but not Gnomoria, Banished or Timber and Stone). the AI is not impressing, but it didn't feel worse than any of the other similar games. i like CTW because you can 'win", the UI is good, you have a tech tree and less dwarves. the 4 different worlds also offer slightly different gameplay. you can also play it sandbox style without big monster waves - my 7 year old daughters love that.

"About: Craft The World is a unique sandbox strategy game, the mix of Dungeon Keeper, Terraria and Dwarf Fortress." Don't believe everything you read. As a huge Terraria and Dungeon Keeper fan, both games being in my top ten of best games of all time, I can say that this game has nothing to do with Terraria/Dungeon Keeper. The games share almost no similarity whatsoever. Who the heck wrote that anyway? Anyway, this game could have been entertaining if not for the following: - The dwarves are rather dumb. You can't control them all directly (only one at a time) and it's hard to herd them around to keep them safe, especially when you don't have a shelter yet. They also like to fall off bridges and cliffs or get stuck in an area where you can easily climb out of. They have the intelligence of a LemmingTM. That's for sure. - The controls when controlling a dwarf feel very clunky. Or the dwarves are simply drunk. I dunno. - The crafting system is simply terrible. You can click the item you wish to construct and you'll see a blueprint of it. You then need to drag all the items to this blueprint in order to craft it. Was it so hard to just automatically put all items in the blueprint whenever you click the item you want to craft? You will need to craft so many items to get through the seemingly endless crafting 'quests', it's tedious and boring. - It's frustrating to get through these crafting 'quests'. I was still learning the ropes of the game and took my time. Unfortunately the game is rather unforgiving, even in its 'easy' level. If you don't hurry up you can count on countless enemies attacking after a certain time. While my patience was being tested with the above issues I got zerg-rushed by monsters who stole a ton of my items and killed off/chased away all my dwarves. I give it three stars because I think the game has potential, but as it stands now it's rather boring and annoying. Here's hoping it'll get improved with a much needed patch.