Diggles: The Myth of Fenris

Pros • Strong exploration and unit development components • The game has character • Decent tutorial • Good music • Encourages attachment to your dwarfs • There is a lot of game here • Game system oddly compelling	Cons • Game is too slow and much too spread out • Cut scenes poorly paced • Difficult to find and select your dwarfs • Heavy system requirements for the game style, (and they're not kidding, minimum requirements really sputter and choke on Diggles) • Although the box says it is, the game is not XP compatible • No game speed adjustment • Insufficient documentation • Single player only
Bottom Line Great material, but they missed with the delivery. If you think about your favourite comedians, be they Charlie Chaplin, The Three Stooges, The Marx Brothers, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Bill Cosby, Jeff Foxworthy, Steven Wright, Jerry Seinfeld, Tom Green, or your Uncle Willey, it's not always that they have the best material; it's the delivery of their comedy that makes them fun. In a book called Great Comedians Talk About Comedy, Woody Allen opined that "it isn't the jokes...it's the individual himself. It's the funny-character emergence that does it. The best material in the world in the hands of a guy who is a hack or doesn't know how to deliver jokes is not going to mean anything." Diggles has pretty good material; the Dwarfs in the game have character, and their jokes aren't so awful. They have all the comedic timing, though, of traffic lights: Set up the joke...long pause...deliver the punch line...long pause...all laugh...long pause...long pause; leaving the person playing the game/watching the cut-scene recognizing that there was, indeed, a joke there, but feeling more impatient than entertained. Talking about comedic timing may seem an odd way to begin a videogame review, but Diggles' bumper-to-bumper cut-scene attempts at humour are equally reflective of the play of the game: Great material, off-paced delivery.

Diggles is a brew of real-time strategy, and Dwarf colony sim. It includes an engaging experience system, whereby Dwarfs get better at the things they do, gaining skills in food preparation, stone work, metal work, kung fu, ranged weapons, or whatever it is they happen to engage in. You can even encourage Dwarfs to specialize and develop strong and focused skill sets. Dwarfs have work and leisure hours, and when they aren't working, they entertain themselves, eat, and even choose life-partners and reproduce, which is important because Dwarfs also have a limited life span, but are able to pass their skills on to their offspring. Dwarf colonies expand as you instruct them to dig tunnels, gather resources, invent new technologies, and construct buildings. All the while, there are side quests and an over-arching story thread pulling that development onward, not to mention other clans of Dwarfs to compete with. Diggles involves constant exploration and discovery, constant management of the multiple pressures of technological advancement, resource gathering, Dwarf happiness, character development, exploration, combat and story progression to keep the player interested. The core game is excellent.

The trouble with Diggles, though, is that this fun is delivered in fits and starts. As your Dwarf clan grows and spreads out, it becomes difficult to locate and manage individual Dwarfs due to interface problems. You will spend much of your time simply scrolling around the expansive underground areas you are exploring trying to locate a Dwarf you can give an order to, find resources for them, plan next expansions, locate and give orders to your construction facilities, keep an eye on enemies, order new explorations, etc.: scroll, scroll, scroll, click; scroll, scroll...scroll, scroll, scroll, click; more scrolling than clicking is not a good balance of interactivity. The cycle of work/leisure time for Dwarfs is also very interesting, but means that there are often stretches where the game player really has little to do but wait for Dwarfs to get back to work (there is no game speed adjustment). The manual is also insufficient, and the player is left to trial and error to determine where facilities can be constructed and what they do. Even the install is ponderous, and the so-called Quick Save takes what seems forever. There are lots of opportunities for bathroom breaks when playing Diggles, which is good, because the core game is so absorbing that you will find yourself playing it long past the point of enjoyment. You'll find yourself irritated with the pace, yet unable to stop. Diggles then, succeeds greatly at engaging game players, yet not so well at entertaining them.

Oh, and what's up with "Dwarfs"? Everybody knows that "Dwarves" is the preferred plural of "Dwarf," and the constant use of "Dwarfs" really starts to irritate after a while.

Woody Allen goes on to say in that same interview that, "what they [comedy audiences] want is an intimacy with the person. They want to like the person and find the person funny as a human being. The biggest trap comedians fall into is trying to get by on the basis of their material. That's just hiding behind jokes..." Gaming audiences aren't so different, and it is unfortunate that Diggles falls into a similar trap of hiding behind its excellent, material while flubbing the delivery.

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