Dwarves are – and I’ll brook no argument here – the best of the Tolkien and Scandinavian-inspired fantasy races. Tough, stalwart and hairy, they make Elves look wimpy and humans look terribly dull.
While they tend to play second fiddle to the heroes of your typical fantasy adventures, in KING Art’s upcoming tactical RPG, The Dwarves, they’re finally in the limelight. The developer’s taken to Kickstarter to fund the game – after doing two previous, successful campaigns for The Book of Unwritten Tales 2 and Battle Worlds: Kronos – and it’s already looking quite promising.
Based on the cracking fantasy novel of the same name, The Dwarves follows the same story of the first book, but with liberties taken for the change in medium. Hero Tungdil Goldhand, a Dwarf raised among humans, sets of on an adventure throughout a fantasy land surrounded by various Dwarven kingdoms, fighting off nasty beasties and tricky Älfar (think evil Elves) in real-time tactical brawls.
While I’m particularly keen to see how KING Art manages to bring the novel to life, particularly since author Markus Heitz is penning some of the new side-quests, the real draw here is the combat.
The Dwarves uses a physics-based “crowd combat” system, allowing the Dwarfs that Tungdil can have in his little army to fight against overwhelming odds in battles that evoke Lord of the Rings’ Helm’s Deep. Foes will swarm the wee warriors, smothering them under weapons and flesh, but one strike from a Dwarven axe can send masses of them flying, smashing them into other enemies, knocking them off bridges and into deep chasms.
From the Kickstarter pitch: “Our Crowd Combat System uses physical parameters like mass, dimension and momentum of individual characters to calculate a realistic flocking behavior. If an enemy in the front is hurled into an ally behind him, the information instantaneously travels across the entire group and causes them to react accordingly – everyone is affected.”
The campaign only kicked off today and has already generated nearly $70,000 in pledges, leaving it $180,000 from its goal.