Dark Gnome

The gameplay has a good foundation and framework, but once you look at any part of the design you'll find it shallow and extremely limited*, and lacking in polish. The game can't tell if it wants to be an idle game or an active game, so it utilizes the worst of both, hitting that sweet spot where you have to wait on everything but don't have any actual idle-game oriented systems implemented, making for utterly needless and unpleasant delays. The game [i]heavily[/i] spams advertisements for paid elements at you, and all 'idle' like effects seem implemented solely as a way to gouge money off of players. It's tasteless, tacky, and shameful. Finally, the game is sluggish. It is extremely draggy, and that drag is everywhere. You click on something, it takes forever for the resulting animation to progress. It's hard to tolerate, especially on top of a lack of interface polish and the game's needless idle elements. *[b]([/b][i]Examples: Characters can level, but it's a sloppily balanced, automatic stat [eg, hp and damage] boosting affair. You can purchase and assign a single skill from a set of three (that selection based on class) to any character, which is already limited enough as far as customization goes, but the skills themselves are limited in concept and typically have lengthy cooldowns. There is equipment, but the equipment breaks after a few uses, which is a hard design to make work in any game; Here, they just feel like stat boosting consumable potions more than actual equipment. And did I mention how heavily everything is based in premium purchases? Or how low a return you actually get from those? And every single component of the game is arranged to a level of (lack of) sophistication and thoughtless greed matching to these examples. Nevermind how absolutely dreadful the interface is, in places. No, really, I'd probably quit playing this game just for all the frustrating, stupid interface design choices scattered around. If I accidentally click on the guild tower while dragging the map? Oops, I get a pop up that forces me to go to another screen (remember, everything in this game drags awfully, so that's worse than it sounds), without any ability to dismiss the prompt. If I want to leave a screen? There's no consistent 'back' icon location, but there IS an easy to accidentally click 'exit to launch menu' icon that you can easily confuse yourself into clicking. And then, bam, more dragging loading sequences. How about quest prompts during the dungeon sequences for things you can't complete yet, that require going through several screens, and that you get frequently? Why do we need to be spammed by something the game can easily tell we can't yet do anything with? Giving us a quick way to bypass the prompts is the least that could be done. And so forth.. And then there are bugs, elements with poor clarification or user feedback, and more. Very little of the game seems properly designed with players in mind.[/i][b])[/b] This game could easily become something recommendable, if the developer started giving a damn about taking pride in their work. What's really odd is that the foundation has a lot of potential. Okay, to be precise, the game is an utterly generic RPG dungeon crawler / town sim design with absolutely no creative tweaks to the expectations one would have of those genre considerations. So not potential in the sense of offering anything new. But as far as offering a fun, straightforward example of that style of game, this could easily nail it, giving us something that'll satisfy a particular itch. It's like one person developed the core engine and framework with care and respect, and then another individual came in to flesh out the game and actively sabotaged every thing they could find while putting in minimal effort otherwise. I don't like that hypothetical second person and, so long as that influence is involved in the game, it just can't be recommended. Rather, since every appealing element is compromised in some way, the game can't be recommended at all. Not for being uncompromisingly awful, but for actively sabotaging every element that it does get right. If the developer were to apply themselves as much to properly developing the supporting systems, interface, and paid elements of the game as they did to the initial framework, then this game could make for a really good time-killer. As is, the game's current focus is based entirely in trying to determine which game element is going to be the first to frustrate you to the point of abandoning the game.

I've been looking for a game that nails the loop of fight, loot, built interesting and shiny weapons and hunt for better loot. this game isn't it sadly. i'll break down the main ways this game fails combat: it just feels... soggy. whenever you attack with one of your guys, it’s a good 5-10 secs until you a can attack with your next, you can’t even click on your guy until the last guys done, to ready an attack. and so far, having reached to the starting zone of the 2nd world zone, I’ve seen nothing of interest from it other than "deal more damage" and "heal some damage" or "do more damage to a random target” Micro: I can look past uninteresting combat, but the game just shows a massive disregard the players time. Let’s take gear. I’ve made my little boys these stone swords. Boosting the damage and allowed them not to get trashed. There’s a small problem, they break in 10 missions. In order to repair them I have to take them off the dwarf, go into the smiths menu, then click on sword, then wait 1-4 or so min based on how many missions I’ve dared to use this weapon of war on. Even just letting me fix them while my dwarfs hold onto them would be nice, but no. wait times: here is what really killed it for me, on top of everything else. I could put up with the boring crafting system (from what I’ve seen), the clear demands to pay (the only way to gain new things to craft, is a) have a thief with a 10-25% to pick wooden chests, (That’s not even brining up the questionably strong looking heroes, that seemly you can only buy) or b) cough up money to buy keys. It’s the distain that it seems to have for your time. To start a quest at level 7 heroes, if I was somehow magical not hurt on the trip, I would have to wait 1-2 mins just for the little buggers to stop messing about, and that’s if I don’t get hurt. If I do its 40-35 secs (the higher upgrades then this cost crystals) per hp. My level 7 thug has 37 hp. On top of this is the micro you have do as I said before, this just makes it even worse TL;DR could be a fun game with work, as it stands quite a few things hold it back. I wouldn’t download it unless you care nothing for your time, there’s better things to spend it on. (even other free games). I for one might play some more to see if it gets any better, but I don’t think it will

This was a very well put together game ruined by business decisions. Once you actually get somewhere in the game you really hit a wall of waiting time periods and having so many in app purchases thrown at you. I would have supported the dev's and this game if it weren't for their insanely greedy and annoying cash grab mechanics. Once you hit lvl 6 you have to wait 4.5 minutes to use those characters again, makes it very very hard to actually progress, it's like the dev's either want your money or they don't want you to play. I'll change my review(and decision to financially support this) if and when that ever gets reworked.

This is almost a decent F2P. With a little more love, and a lot more respect for the player, it might even have been good. The pixel aesthetic is fine. The progression is decent in some areas, though rather linear. I managed to keep the music on for a day or two, and the sounds are decent... The main problem is the grind. There are no passive gains, and within a few days, the rewards quickly become few and far between. I understand that grind and diminishing returns is mandatory for this kind of game, but here it quickly becomes absurd, and there is a general aversion to good math. E.g. The semi-competitive arena isn't unlocked until about L10 (minimum 3 days grind, and probably more for average progression). You are then tossed into competition with all of the players that have been around for almost a year. At first I thought no problem, I wasn't losing anything. But after a season completed, I got a tiny reward for coming in 38th, and I realized just how useless the reward/competition was geared. If you came in 11th place every 2 weeks - it would take 2 YEARS, to earn the cheapest reward (a nifty skin, big whoop). So the multiplayer is designed for the benefit of 3-5 players max. No thanks. The micro-transactions are tolerable at best. The pop-ups to buy nonsense (seriously, don't buy) are somewhat frequent and annoying. It does trickle enough premium currency for the F2P to expand your hero roster to 16 within a decent time frame. This allows you to play about as actively as you want (with minor waiting times for healing, which everyone hates, but I don't really mind). However, every other premium purchase is a bad deal, except for the Hero packs, which run at least $30 each, which is too much. So I may have been tempted to drop $5-$10 on this kind of game, but that would gain me nothing of any value. I only played this long because I had nothing better to do.

Very good pixel game, a lot of skirmishes, a lot of bosses for which we get achievements on the steam, the arena for players. In the game, we can get gnomes to teams that have slots for equipment and also have skills that can be learned by the trainer. You can also craft armor weapons and various useful items here. This game inspired me because there are Titans here and this game has something like a guild which I liked very much at the very beginning.

Time Locked game.... Not a huge fan of this format at all, would be far better to reduce the experience/gold and just let people play - especially given how slow the combat phases play out as you need to to multiple clicks to perform any attacks or skills. Waiting multiple minutes, even at lower levels - and this scales as you progress, for your characters to rest before you can launch is a bad mechanic, especially because they don't heal during this time - that's a totally separate and additional time sink layer. Cost to create and repair items against the durability is terribly balanced against how much you gain for doing missions. You lose currency for equipping your characters with even low level created gear. The team/roster interface is clunky at best, and just ugly and un-intuitive even for a retro format. Overall the game feels like a poorly thought out casher with some quirky retro art styling.

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Super fun retro gaming.