The Rings of Powder

Review

As the king of the dwarves and defender of your underground kingdom, explore surrounding areas and gather resources for building new rooms and military units, or trade the resources with the people on the surface. Fight off Goblins, Skeletor and even dragons to survive. It won’t be an easy road as you start with a small kingdom, and your enemies won’t take long to launch their attacks from different directions. Welcome, my liege, to The Rings of Powder.

The Rings of Powder is a strategy game developed and self-published by Artificial Worlds Ltd. on the Steam platform on the 27th of October, 2023.

The campaign mode consists of 6 missions which you can play on three different levels of difficulty - Calm, Relaxing And Challenging. You can also create a custom game where you can choose the dungeon size, enemy respawn cycle, maximum respawn of enemies, resources bonus, and dungeon density.

It took me a few attempts to grasp how the game works; I had a bit of trouble understanding how to recruit more dwarves so I could conscript them into more units. The other issue I encountered, and that is due totally my wrongdoing, is that I tried to play the game at a challenging level of difficulty from the get-go. So, before I get more in-depth about this game, I would recommend that you start on the Relaxing difficulty level. That way, you’ll have a bit more time to figure out what to do and, more importantly, the enemy attacks will be spread a bit further apart.

What I like about this game is that the missions are slightly different for each replay. The dungeon in itself is of a similar size for each playthrough, but the rooms are slightly randomised, which is really good for replayability, and will affect your strategy for approaching that level.

Your most important room, and the one that must be guarded at all times, is the Throne Room. If any enemies reach this room and destroy it, it’s game over. In the first couple of missions, it won’t matter too much, but after that, it will be vital to guard the Throne Room as enemies will start moving in rather quickly, and if a red dragon enters the room and you have only three dwarves defending it, they’ll become corn dogs rather quickly. The other important aspect of this room is the trading with the surface. At the start of each game, you’ll need to be able to trade resources with the people on the surface. For that, you must have workers in your group. Each time you send metals to the surface, it will take three workers and a specified amount of time – minimum 30 seconds - but when it is done, you’ll gain an extra recruit for your military units. The catch is that you’ll usually start with only 10 workers and five fighters. Each time you build something in a room, you’ll need two or three workers, and the same number of workers when you send resources to the surface. So, you’ll quickly run out of workers.  To create military units, you must have a minimum of three available fighters to create a unit. When you gather more resources, such as bars of gold and gems, you can create stronger units. But still, you need to attract more recruits.

When you launch a game, you’ll usually have several rooms that you can use straight away. You might have rooms with metal or gem deposits and some without anything in them. You can use the empty rooms to build residential or training halls, or even a forge, assuming that you have already built a metal mine for the latest. All the other rooms must be explored before you can access them and build something within them. The thing is, most of these rooms will have one of several enemy units, which can vary from one game to the next. And you have to defeat them to be able to build new things in these rooms.

As you progress through the missions, you’ll acquire new room structures and units which I will let you discover. What you must always remember is that you can only have four units of three fighters posted in any given room. If you can create a dragon as part of your force, it will be equivalent to a unit of three soldiers in terms of the number of units you can have in a room, which is four.

Each mission will have specific tasks to accomplish to successfully complete it, and it is usually a mix of the number of resources you have to acquire, and defeating a boss. But again, each time you restart a mission, the dungeon is slightly different and therefore, you might need to rethink how to approach it. When you successfully complete a mission, you’ll receive points that you can use to unlock ancient technology, which will help you in your next game.

I enjoyed the cutscenes before each mission - a few are a bit humorous and might give you a bit of a smile.

The graphics are good, and the game runs well. However, regarding the different types of rooms you can create, it is a bit on the low side; I thought they could have done more in that regard. But overall, it is not bad at all. The fact that you can customise your own game offers good replayability. Try your luck on the challenging level of difficulty, but be prepared as the enemies will attack the Throne Room quickly.

Review written by THE CPT FROGGY for Zeepond.com

The Rings of Powder Steam Store Page