This game is a legendarily crafted sapphire in the rough melded to a platinum ring. This is the Dwarf Fortress with graphics you have been waiting for. While it is not as complex, not as unforgiving, it is far easier to get into and get immersed in thanks to a UI that works well. This game is so fun that I've ditched most of my other games to play it instead, and after several abyssmal failures I finally have a stable kingdom.

The game is still in development, but the developer seems determined to see this through and make it the best game possible. He typically updates every two weeks, adding things, fixing bugs, balancing values. He listens and posts on the game's forums, and has implemented a bunch of changes suggested by the community. The man has earned my faith in him.

I cannot overstate how happy I am with this game. I bought it on sale, but felt so guilty that I got it for cheap that I made my girlfriend buy it as well. I told her that if she didn't like it, I'd pay her back, and consider it a donation for the development of the game. Please do yourself a favor and try this if you enjoy management sims, building games, minecraft, or ant farms. At the price it's sold at, it's a steal if you love it, and small loss if you don't.

Of all of the Dwarf Fortress inspired games, Gnomoria is without question the farthest along. It manages to bring much of what I loved from DF to a sensible, usable, but still powerful user interface, along with having a unique flavor of its own. in particular, this game has the best crafting system of any builder that I've ever seen, combining flexibility and ease-of-use.

The developer is extremely professional; every bug I have reported has been fixed within a week or two, and he frequently implements awesome suggestions from the forums when they agree with his vision of the game.

If you are not coming from a DF/city builder roguelike background, expect a steep learning curve. Well worth it in my opinion, that is not to say that the game is extremely challenging, in default difficulty the world is forgiving enough that you can probably get by.

The early and mid-game are extremely interesting and fun, but unfortunately late game variety is limited to training yet more powerful soldiers to curb stomp goblins, mining ore to train your blacksmiths and then smelting it down for better quality weapons, and building giant temples or awesome structures. While this is enjoyable, I do feel like a late game should be fleshed out. Given the developer's track record however, I have every confidence this will occur. I don't know how he will do it, but I do know it will be awesome.

Easily worth $20 in current form, $7.99 is a steal.

It's our second winter.
Mel was torn apart by a goblin horde before we could arrive to help, Garth lost an eye and poor Karragan is now a cripple. Mants are raiding our farms and our last Yak had to be butchered for food to make it through the winter. To make matters worse the new gnomad I set to smiths hall has been making ingots for 4 days and has produced only 1. Perhaps I should return Mel to the smith's post... o wait, his face was chewed off and his corpse is starting to bloat...
On a good note we have nearly 80 kegs of beer and the Ambassador loved the statue I placed in his guest room, so I guess things are looking up. Nope, spoke to soon, a skeleton just slaughtered all three of my miners.

10/10 really fun game.

A fantastic sandbox village management. It might not be as good/complex as Dwarf Fortress, but it's cleaner, it's beautiful, it's simple, it's a very loyal "copy", with a UI more friendly, and I just love the artwork... I fell in love with that game, and it's only on alpha stage.

Basically you "kinda" take control of very loyal dwarves and you have to do everything in order to keep your dwarves alive, since getting food and drink to defend them from goblin attacks.

It's not that sort of game that you drag a selection area and command the selected units to build something: no! Your dwarves act for their own, you may change their job, but they do the rest by themselves.

The feeling of building shelters inside the mountains, with levels fulfilled of goods it's inexplicable, there are no possible words to describe it.

PS: Don't judge my hours, I didn't play it on steam that much

Pros:
- Excellent mechanics
- Friendly ui
- Simple and Clean
- Few games of its genre (besides Dwarf Fortress, we have Towns, Castle Story and dungeonkeeper right?)
- Pretty colorful, I really love this kind of "graphics" to be honest

Cons
- Lacks tutorial, you've to spend some time watching tutorials
- Alpha (?) is that a con?
- It's not Dwarf Fortress

Personal rate: 9.7/10 - My favorite steam game

Your yaks have bred so quickly that you no longer have any food, and the cows themselves are all dead of starvation. You have 60 rooms made of dirt with a pile of straw for beds, for each gnome, and then one massive room made of solid gold filled with nothing but statues and a few tables to eat at. Everyone is dying of starvation except for the people who grow the food, who are eating it the second they harvest it. The miners have just dug into another deadly cavern, so you just lost the entire seam of minerals you mined, as well as all your carts, and all your miners, and all their picks.

I sure do love North Korea Simulator.

Yes, it is a Dwarf Fortress Clone. No, I don't care.
DF has the problem of no or weird graphics and is not very user friendly.

If you are looking for a similar experience and/or got shafted by Towns, this is the game you need to buy. Early Access done right. Weekly Updates, a living forum on the developer website and a caring developer round this package up.

Buy it, there is no reason not to, if you like games like this.