From Norway, today Pineleaf Studio and Merge Games have announced a brand new co-op real-time strategy game called DwarfHeim for PC. The game focuses on city building and defense against hordes of nasty trolls and rival dwarven clans with a focus on working together with your teammates to succeed.
Key Features: Competitive & Co-op Multiplayer — Team up with 3 other players in Conquest, a competitive multiplayer game mode. Tear through the enemy team’s defenses and destroy their Town Hall! 4 Unique Classes — Choose from Builder, Miner, Warrior, and Diplomat! Build, Mine, Defend and Manage — Choose your own strategies, units, buildings and technology that best suits you and your team. Single-Player Experience — Sandbox mode: Explore a vast, open area in the single-player. Build your own experience and play alone or with up to 3 friends in the slow-paced sandbox mode. Survival mode: Test your strategies and strength with up to 3 friends or mystic strangers and try to outlive all of the troll waves coming your way. Ranked Matchmaking — Rank up by winning competitive matches and face players that match your skill level. Friend-Pass — Invite your friends along to play on a free downloadable client of DwarfHeim, even if they haven’t purchased the game!As you can see by the last bullet point there, the game offers a unique feature to really encourage folks to play together. Called Friend-Pass only one player is required to actually own the game so everyone can join in on the fun.
The hook appears to be different distinct roles to play as - miners, warriors, builders. These classes depend on each other and actually seem to work different levels of the map - for instance - the miners appear to actually be underground while the builders are on the surface building defensive structures for the warriors to occupy.
DwarfHeim is scheduled to be released this Fall on Steam.