Dorfs: Hammers for Hire from Ravegan and Purple Play is a single-player or co-op platformer in which you’ll have to forge powerful weapons and essential items to fuel an army’s success in the heat of battle. Check our Dorfs: Hammers for Hire review!
A co-op crafting platformer where your friends prove worse than any enemy. Craft weapons and armor from your dwarven workshop, help your patron’s army win the battle, and make your way up the Iron Mountain!
In Dorfs: Hammers for Hire from Ravegan and Purple Play, you’ll be in control of your choice from a few dwarves to forge weapons and armor for the army at war with the Shadow Mercenaries. As you start your adventure, you’re offered to begin the Campaign in which the game’s mechanics will be introduced progressively.
The gameplay in Dorfs: Hammers for Hire blends resource management with platforming level design. You’ll collect raw materials scattered throughout the single-screen levels, process them, and craft items such as weapons, armor, and tools. Orders come in real-time, reminiscent of the way Overcooked! gives you customer orders. The platforming elements add an extra layer of challenge, as you’ll need to move around the environment depending on what you’re trying to do.
You can track the progress of the ongoing battle through the Battle Bar gauge. Each time you successfully deliver an order, your army pushes back the Shadow Mercenaries, gaining ground on the bar. Victory is achieved when your efforts earn at least one banner, and you instantly win the match if you get three banners!
In multiplayer mode, which allows up to 4 players to play at the same time, the gameplay changes slightly. Instead of simply dropping an item on a station and letting it process automatically as in single-player mode, you’ll have to frantically press the square button to perform the action manually. You’ll have to coordinate the efforts of each player on the screen to be effective. Once you’ve played a few levels, you’ll unlock the Arcade mode, which lets you play with up to four friends in a similar fashion to Castle Crashers.
With that said, I must mention a major problem I had with this game that significantly hindered my progress: inconsistent controls. In a game that requires quick, precise actions similar to what’s required of you in the Overcooked! franchise, I expected precise controls. Unfortunately, performing an action in front of a station (picking up an item, dropping it off at a processing station) often doesn’t connect, which is incredibly frustrating.
Far too often, I’d (try to) pick up an item only to realize moments later that the button input hadn’t registered, forcing me to go back and try the action again. There were instances where I had to press the square button 5 to 8(!!) times before successfully interacting with an object. By the fourth level, I had gotten used to this bug by spamming the Square button in front of each station. It’s baffling that this glaring issue passed QA and made it into the released version. One thing to note is that, for some reason, this problem is less present in multiplayer.
Another aspect I wanted to mention is the game’s presentation. It is quite basic, featuring single-screen 3D levels with minimal detail. On my PlayStation 5, the performance was disappointing, with the game running at a choppy frame rate and not always being able to keep up to 60 frames per second, even with a single player on the screen. This felt difficult to accept, especially considering that most modern titles deliver smooth 60 FPS gameplay with significantly higher levels of detail.
This game has a full trophy list with a Platinum trophy for you to add to your collection. The list is split into 5 Bronze trophies, 7 Silver trophies, and 8 Gold trophies. For this Platinum trophy, you’ll have to deliver your first order, win a level with every character, win a level with at least two players, saw 100 logs, hammer 100 hot ingots, deliver 200 orders, deliver an order while poisoned, unlock all bonus levels, earn 15 victories by completing the battle bar in the Campaign, finding each rune, and complete the Campaign, among others.
Dorfs: Hammers for Hire is a single-player or local co-op game in which you craft weapons and items for an army. I enjoyed the quirky single-screen platforming sequences, where it often takes a few moments to understand where each station is located. One thing that hurt my experience, however, was the inconsistent controls, which often don’t connect before a station, and the fact that the game couldn’t stay at a stable 60 frames per second, even with the simple level design. Dorfs: Hammers for Hire is out on PlayStation 5 with a $14.99 price tag. There’s also a PlayStation 4 version of the game available for the same price as a separate purchase.
Disclaimer
This Dorfs: Hammers for Hire review is based on a PlayStation copy provided by Purple Play.
https://www.purpleplay.games/
