She says 10 hours played...
That is not enough time for a game review of any kind really (even with modern FPS twitch play shooters). To be honest you need about a good 100 plus just to get a feel for the game from just failures and successes. I KNOW that I'm a horrible player, but since the start of playing it (even with the help of a roommate that played it longer) I started to get better.
To write an article after 10 hours and say its a bad game needs to be rewritten to be honest, and I'll throw in my opinion its much easier to play with a tileset that doesn't burn out your eyes in a matter of moments.
I dont agree that you have to invest 100 hours in general to have an informed opinion about any game, especially for people who already have experience with the genre.
But 10 hours seems to be not enough for something as complicated as DF or most other roguelikes.
The premise of that article was as follows:
I decided to give the game ten hours of my life. I set a goal of doing my legit best to avoid using external guides or hints and to hold off using internal explanations unless I felt lost. I’d experiment and explore, seeing what I could ascertain from the user interface and environment and making as much progress as I could by my wits alone. And I learned one thing well: Dwarf Fortress is not a game that will hold your hand.
That sums up the whole article right there.
Its the perfect way of setting oneself up for failure when getting into dwarf fortress. And some more research in advance would have indicated that quite clearly.
It is bad journalism because the journalist tried to become an expert in the matter herself instead of talking to experts first while also allocating not enough time and not doing enough research to understand the subject.
So in the end we got an article that conveys only the confusion of the author but doesnt provide as much meaningful information as it could have.
It also highlighted some of the issues with DF: The learning curve and dependency on guides and wikis make it pretty much impossible to understand the game within 10 hours and its not obvious enough that this is the case and where the documentation can be found.
The necessity of guides and documentation is not a problem by itself.
But then again, I really admire that someone actually decided to write an article on DF.
Except that I dont consider this to be an article... its more like commentary representing a journalists own opinion instead of an (reasonably) unbiased representation of facts.
If you cant tell the difference between commentary and articles at a glance without actually reading the past the headline not only the journalists but also the editors are doing something horribly wrong...