I love Dwarf Fortress so very much, it's absolutely brilliant and I've easily spent more time playing it than every game released released within the last year combined. It's like the perfect mix of Dungeon Keeper and The Sims along with a few splashes of SimCity and Nethack.
Glorious, absolutely glorious.
My only major complaint is that once you get used to the game and become familiar with what works and what doesn't, it becomes almost too easy. There are few long-lasting challenges beyond completing your own ambitions. Goblin attacks are easily pushed back once you've established a proper defense, and few Titans and other monster are dangerous enough to cause any real harm. Although with the new randomized Titans it's possible to get Titan that are almost completely impossible to kill, but even then it feels less like a challenge since there's little you can do to fight them and more like an annoying bug. Only way to kill em is with magma, which can be entertaining to design elaborate traps employing it, but even then it's more a nuisance than fun.
But still the joy of building those elaborate structures is incredibly satisfying. Recently I've taken to building massive above-ground castle structures, but I'm getting a bit bored of the design so methinks I've a new layout in mind for my next fortress. Even performing some tests with my current fortress.
It shall be beautiful!
Seriously, if you like Dungeon Keeper or any other sort of game in that same vein, you absolutely must play Dwarf Fortress. It's not and easy game to learn, but once you have it's so very, very rewarding to play.
