Dwarf Journey is an enjoyable short rogue-lite but it has some horrible grindy achievements which can leave a bad taste for completionists. Beating the game took 7 hours, completing the grindy achievements added 4 more hours.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: 11h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 5/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: No, but you don’t need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Yes, very very grindy. I’ll explain more below.
DLC-Only achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: For one you need a little bit of luck
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
Dwarf Journey is an enjoyable rogue-lite that isn’t too long and eases the players into the game. The game has 4 biomes, all with an end boss. You collect experience and ore during your run. Ore is used to making gear and upgrade it. When you die you lose all the ore you’ve with you. In the first biome, you have a lot of opportunities to store your ore, so that if you die you don’t lose too much. This way a run always feels rewarding, because it will help you toward becoming stronger, even when the run didn’t go so well.
Every time when I entered a new biome, it felt like a new challenge. The monsters are stronger and you have to learn their abilities. But with some practice and upgrading your gear and stats it would be doable. The second boss gave me a bit of a challenge and especially the fourth boss. That one took me many tries.
I liked most of the achievements in Dwarf Journey. You get them for smashing pots/crates, eating meat, upgrading gear, killing monsters. The normal stuff you would expect in this type of game with no missable achievement. What I really dislike is how grindy the last 3 achievements are. For me, those were dying X amount of times and eating 500 meat. I combined those 2 by starting a run and if the first boss wasn’t within 3/4 rooms I would instantly go back to town, which gladly counts as a death. Otherwise, I would go for the boss because the chest that you get afterward gives 1 or 2 meat. After getting to the 500 meat it took me another 30 minutes of restarting a run instantly after entering it, which was possible to do 5/6 times per minute. But those last 3 achievements took me 4 hours after completing the game. This sucks because I enjoyed the game a lot before those 4 hours of grinding, but the last memory of a completionist will be of a boring grind with those arbitrary achievements. which leaves a bad taste while the rest of the game was a lot of fun.
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This review for Dwarf Journey was written on 27 April 2021, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 83 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.
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