Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Nov 29, 2021

  A classic game from Germany, with a nice controversy around the band "Wiggles": The band didn't want to be associated with these coarse, substance-abusing dwarves, so they had to rename the game to "diggles". In the game itself we have to guide a tribe of dwarves through several large levels on their way to re-store the chain of fenris, and ultimately subdue the beast. It has a 3d environment viewed from the side. The dwarves have their own abilities (and a maximum score of it), lifespan and demands to be served. If you don't fulfil their demands, they might go extinct While it was quite innovative for its time (the only somewhat similar game was the Creatures series, which didn't have combat), the controls are rather unresponsive and sometimes complicated for todays standards. Buy the game if you were a fan, or wait for a sale, if you ant to see how these early-2000s-games felt like. I generally had fun with both the original and this version...
• Tengu

  Aug 6, 2022

  Fun little game. Its not perfect but there is no other game quite like it :)
• gamedeal user

  Jan 18, 2023

  Totally bugged audio for me. Its either none at all or only specific sounds that play. And i have had moments that it works only for the next cutscene to go silent. Tried to fix it but no luck and found nothing online. Kind of sad because it looks like an old hidden gem that i would have enjoyed.
• gamedeal user

  May 31, 2023

  Fun, quite addictive, nice graphics and art style, looks innocent but with plenty of adult humor. However, it's all for nothing because the game is filled with technical issues, both major and minor ones. 1. There's a lot of new buildings and technologies to discover. Creating them increases your "civilization level" – a hidden, in-game variable. However, if you want your group of dwarves to remain happy - and in turn survive long term by procreating - then forget about developing anything beyond most essential stuff that you can discover during the first 30 minutes of gameplay. With more advanced technology, after a few generations, new dwarves will get very grumpy, unhappy and won’t make babies. This happens even if you build every “luxury” that’s available during the current level. Stick to tent and fireplace. 2. Semi-randomly generated campaign levels seem fun at first but can get annoying. During the final “lava world” I had to dig absurdly deep to discover (aka generate) Vampires clan and Fenris lair. I don’t mind doing tunnels and whatnot, but it was literally hours of digging, discovering yet another cookie-cutter corridor filled with far too many of those red monsters. Climb up one square, kill them from above, realize there’s still nothing here, dig deeper, rinse and repeat. Then spam those mineshafts with elevators to have even a remote chance of not starving before reaching your destination. That’s not really fun anymore. I seriously though the level generator got bugged this playthrough. 3. Stupid AI – entire enemy clan can be wiped out by a single dwarf. Place a trap right at the entrance to their village. Become hostile by attempting to overtake first available building. Run back and forth under your trap and watch how all enemies turn into pancakes. 4. Sometimes production just gets stuck. Sometimes dwarves decide to walk entire map to fetch a single hamster for cooking, even if there’s a farm nearby. Same thing for warehouse doing "collect food" (or any other resource). So many times I've found one of my dwarves at the other end of the map, collecting a single piece of food left on the ground after opening a random barrel. 5. Suppose you send a group of dwarves to discover an area or solve a quest. If female gives birth on the way, she’ll just stand there and forget her destination. 6. Sometimes, when placing ladders or elevators in remote areas, dwarves would do the job but never return to base, just standing until starvation – unless you find them and manually send them back. 7. Overall, battle or (re)building your base - it always feels like herding cats. Fun at first but gets really annoying when it happens for the 100th time. 8. Internally, the game is based around TCL (scripting language) and some kind of database, implementing heavily event-driven system. Haven't really researched it in depth but my guess is that sometimes, some kind of memory corruption or something similar happens in TCL interpreter or scripts themselves. This causes non-critical faults in some of game logic (aka dwarf or building behavior). It must've been a fun coding experiment back in 2001, but definitely not polished enough. I’ve completed it only because of childhood memories. Otherwise, I’d say it’s a waste of time.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 15, 2020

  I loved this game for a long time, but wasn't able to play it for a few years because of severe bugs that even prevailed after using every known patch tools but after buying this copy every major bug I've experienced after starting alone is gone. Definetly worth it's money.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 15, 2020

  I've been searching for this game for sooo long and then poof - it's on Steam! I still can't believe it! It's exactly how I remember it from my childhood - as addictive now, as it was then, couldn't wish for more! Totally worth it! Thank you guys for bringing this gem here!
• gamedeal user

  Dec 15, 2020

  WTF!?! Who's feet do I have to kiss for finally bringing this game to Steam!! If you ever played and enjoyed, Oxygen not Included, and the new early access game, Hammerington, then you will like this game as well. I even purchased those aforementioned games in the hopes to fill the hole this game left in me decades ago. While a bit dated on graphics (released in 2002), the game still has its same charm and is still very playable. By the end of the game, your dwarves will be riding around on hover boards, and brandishing light sabers. How can you go wrong with that? Thank you Spieleentwicklungskombinat GmbH, for bringing this game back to us!
• gamedeal user

  Dec 17, 2020

  After more than a decade of technical issues preventing this game from being played at more than 2fps without registry editing, it has been revived! This game is in the same vein as other colony survival games such as Oxygen Not Included, Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, but with more focus on the story and quests provided throughout the campaign. When you start the campaign, you have access to only five Diggles and a campfire. In order to progress from this point, you must train your Diggles in many different skills (Wood, Stone, Transport, Food, etc) by performing tasks related to the skill. Once skill requirements have been met, these Diggles can then unlock new buildings and items for you to use, which will also have their own unlockable items and buildings from as well. As these Diggles have individual skill sets, you will need to micromanage your units to level them into the skills they require to unlock the objects you need to progress, and if they die to one of the many hazards in the game, you will need to restart the upskilling process with another Diggle. The Diggles also have their own individual needs, so a large portion of the early mid-game is focused around maximising their mood in order to keep them happy, through the invention of better meals, nicer sleeping quarters, access to baths and to a bar for them to party. By maximising their needs, they will work harder during their work hours, and this will also prevent them from going on strike due to their unmet needs reaching a critical level. Keeping their Morale high also tends to lead to your Diggles making more Diggles, and each new generation has higher skill caps, so it is recommended to do so. The campaign is based around a series of quests set up via cut-scenes, with very sarcastic humour. The humour is very reminiscent of that which you will find in your typical game set in the Ardania universe (Majesty, Impire, etc) and this keeps the game very light-hearted. There is also a skirmish mode, but considering that the game is more designed around longer research trees, I can't see this ends up as anything other than two teams of five Diggles all pelting each other with slingshots, unless the two people playing agree not to fight for a long time. Overall, I think the game is not as good as subsequent releases in the genre, with Rimworld providing more emergent storytelling opportunities, and Oxygen Not Included refining the side-on strategy formula and providing better gameplay mechanically with higher replayability. In spite of this, Diggles still stands up as a strong game from the genre due to it's tech tree, campaign, and it's humour, and for the price, I think it is worth a try.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 23, 2020

  Unfortunately, the game crashes every time I enter the brain settlement in the crystal world with a runtime error (in the cut sequence with the piano music). I would have liked to give a good review but my disappointment too high at the moment. I hope that this error will be fixed at some point. edit: Bug was fixed just a few days after the comment.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 23, 2020

  Liked this game as a kid, but replaying it isn't worth it even for nostalgia's sake. The glaring issue of [b]W[/b]iggles is its AI: 1) Sometimes Wiggles will simply prefer standing around instead of doing tasks for no discernible reason. 2) Wiggles perform tasks in an egregiously inefficient manner, i.e. they walk a mile to chop down a mushroom, carry the trunk back to the production place, craft the item, walk back to the next mushroom and so on instead of just chopping all mushrooms down at once and carrying everything back to stash it. 3) Skills are learned by doing tasks and there are skill requirements for researching new tech, however it's not possible to change the task preferences of your Wiggles. They either only do manually assigned work (and most work cannot be manually assigned, you can't force a wiggle to craft an item for example) or do random work (or nothing as mentioned in point 1). Additionally the game suffers from glacial pacing, which is magnified by the AI issues. Back in the days one of the main selling points of Wiggles was the DUDE WEED sense of humor and the originality of vertical basebuilding. Now that you're no longer twelve years old the humor is cringe and you're better of playing one of the dozens other management sims on Steam or just Dwarf Fortress. Game is kinda cheap though so you might want to pick it up for a quick laugh. If you haven't played this game when it came out don't even bother.