Recent reviews by digitaldrifter

I think this game is good. The story and gameplay itself parodies the insanity that is professional competitive gaming in the present day.

The 'Game'
Instead of the 'game' (like the fictional game itself) being absolutely being based on skill, the outcome is purely determined by a (supposedly random) 50/50 chance. The fake company behind the game invested a lot of resources into funding a Quantum Computing platform to provide the randomness. You, the player , get hired to this fictional company and encounter the rediculousness that is corporate game development, and mainly just big business in general. I would feel that the plot itself is pretty funny if the player has a corporate background, like myself.

The Gameplay (Actually)
The actual gameplay revolves around your specific character's skills. These skills are unlocked as you level up your character with XP. These skills, by default, proc on events, like on the coin flip, when you lose the coin flip, when you win the coin flip and when another skill manages to proc it through their various abilities. These skills can be placed on a large 250+ space hex grid, where skills closer to the center proc before the ones that are further out. Your overall goal is to optimize the layout of these skills so that the proc in a way that make your score (your 'Q') go up exponentially. This 'Q' allows you to go up the ranked ladder and progress the story of the game.

I think the gameplay is pretty interesting, the gameplay loop revolves around moving your skills around, playing a match, and seeing how your skills end up activating, and then repeat the process until you get the desirable outcome. As you get more skills, the random factor of a 50/50 coin flip is obsolete and its now just making number go brrrrr. In the story there is a self awareness that this random decision is obviously bad for real life competitive games, while still making fun of competitive games that are available today.

There are a good number of characters, each with their own concept to maximize the activation of their own skills, but in general the gameplay loop remains the same from what I understand. I only ended up finishing the medic's run in about 7 hours, but I didn't feel like starting another character, which you'd have to do from the start. It makes sense for this game itself, but I slightly wish there was a way to accelerate the speed you can complete characters. Plus you'd have to play the game for at least a couple hours before you unlock the turbo mode, which speeds up the matches by a lot. Luckily you only have to unlock that once then you have access to it across characters, but still. Before getting turbo mode, matches can be a couple minutes long, and its essentially just watching a cutscene and seeing how your skills activate

Other Notes
That leads me to the next thing. I went into this thinking it was an idle game (like Cookie Clicker or similar) where I could just keep the game running and it would just go. That is false. This game involves playing a single match, tweaking the skills, and playing another. There really isn't any significant grinding that requires idle gameplay, so if you are getting this game expecting that, you would be let down.

Overall
I think the gameplay loop is good, its a pretty fun strategy/puzzle type game. I recommend this for anyone who is into those kinds of games.

Its crack. Living out my fantasy of being in Starship Troopers

2025.12.14 Update: Game has definitely improved. Bugs have been getting squashed. The even reduced the game size from ~100+ GB down to ~20 GB with their prod_slim branch. They have also begun adding content again in between some fixing. Definitely recommend again.

2025.09.19 Update: Game is good, but I continue to experience massive game freezes on high end hardware. (9800x3d CPU, RX 7900XT GPU) Doesn't look like thermal throttling on the hardware side, no other games that I own do this atm. Not recommending the game until this is fixed.

I have had approximately 800 hours of the OG Dwarf Fortress played when I was in high school and college a few years ago. I have had stories of mountainhomes that have lasted for years, fought and won wars, become the center of the worlds that I have generated. I have had dwarves who were nothing become the greatest rulers and the most powerful fighters.

In other stories I would spend the time to build out my started expedition crew very carefully, all for them to be killed by a tree falling on them, or some monster jumping out of nowhere and killing the leader of the crew...all before a meaningful base gets built by them. Those stories do not last at all, and then its back to the drawing board.

Dwarf Fortress is a world generator, a story creator, a pioneer of a genre that has inspired other games like it. When it came out on Steam finally, it was absolutely an instant purchase for me. This version of the game is much, much more accessible than the OG is. A graphical tileset versus the old ASCII text design, the game is fully mouse and keyboard compatible instead of having to remembering various shortcuts and keybindings. This greatly increases the chances of many more people trying this game out and eventually witnessing stories of their own. And seeing the artwork that most people had to just imagine before get turned into various sprite art is exciting to me. The graphics are still simple as heck, but its much more inviting for new players than the free version is.

For those who do not know the story of the developers, Bay 12 Games, these are literally just two brothers who decided to begin making a game in the early 2000s, and are still developing it around 20 years later, with really no end in sight at the moment. According to the version number system that they have, we are only around halfway through the development of this game. And the developers have stated that they expected for this game to be their lives' work, wanting to make a fully fledged world building simulation. There are numerous features that are roadmapped right now that still have not begun work on. For someone paying the price of 30 USD, you would be purchasing a great graphical upgrade of a game that would be getting support for at least 20 more years as Bay 12 continues to bring their creation to life.

For those who are a bit nervous about jumping into this game after seeing how many different mechanics exist here. Just ease yourself in, focusing on one thing at a time, and slowly branching out to new features. Don't be afraid to lose, always go into starting a fortress expecting it to fall eventually. IT WILL ALWAYS HAPPEN AT SOME POINT. I also can't recommend the Dwarf Fortress Wiki enough! There is such a large amount of information that exists in this game and the many pages in the wiki definitely help with explaining what everything is and how they interconnect with each other. Don't be uneasy about the complexity of this, for those who are dedicated to learning the inner workings of this game will be sure to get a lot of hours out of playing it.

I greatly recommend this game for anyone who is wanting to spend countless hours in a game that has massive amounts of worldbuilding and a game that would be getting support for many more years to come as well. I hope you enjoy it.

It's pretty chill honestly

This is the game that defined the last half of the year. With everyone cooped up inside because of OBVIOUS WORLD EVENT, this brought us together. Personally I met a good number of people playing this game, and when its hard to meet friends IRL, meeting new people in this game definitely helped.

Also, RED IS SUS!

It's cars playing soccer. What's not to love?

Best 'War-Themed Hat Simulator' out there!