izigame.me

Context: I first played Dwarf Fortress in 2016, and have been playing intermittently since, often checking in for major updates.
The short answer: I recommend Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition (with caveats!)
Let's start with the cons:
- Those expecting a 'smooth and bug free' game play experience will be disappointed: DF continues to do a poor job explaining itself, especially when it comes to more esoteric elements of the game. Take decorating furniture or items for example: unless one searches online and happens on the right answer, it's almost impossible to get your dwarves to decorate what you want. They will instead opt to decorate every on the map with diamonds. (The answer, if you were wondering, is to link a furniture or item stockpile containing what you want improved, along with a stockpile of your preferred decorating material, to the workshop). Can you 'play' the game from birth to death of a fortress without hard-locking bugs? Absolutely, great work here. Can you do so without your dwarves being idiotic due to bugs? Not so much.
- On this note, playing Dwarf Fortress Steam Edition (which I'll refer to as DFSE because I'm lazy) without something called DFHack is a poor experience. DFSE is the leaky ceiling, and DFHack is the set of mandatory tar patches. This shouldn't be necessary.
- A major pain point for me is the continued frustration with military uniforms, equipment and orders. Want your crossbow dwarves to stand in your fortified turret? Direct them there, and one of them might stand in that spot while the others uselessly spill out into the closed hallway behind. Want your dwarves to form a line? Most of them might, while a few may wait patiently under your -Atom Smashing Bridge- to die, twenty tiles away. Equipping your dwarves is essentially black magic; I can see many new players growing too frustrated with the degree of inconsistency military dwarves equip themselves, not knowing, for example, that woodcutters, miners and hunters have secret invisible civilian uniforms that conflict with whatever you assign, or that armor and weapon stands make it harder for militiary dwarves to equip themselves. This type of issue has persisted in vanilla DF for years, and DFSE has inherited and compounded these problems. Please developers, this desperately needs addressed, or else thousands of new potential players will reach a quitting point of frustration and never play DF again.
- Put your hotkeys for bottom bar commands on the images for the commands, or at the least add an option for this and enable it by default. C'mon guys, don't make new players mouse over things for every single input. Yes, you can fix this with a mod and a bit of file manipulation, but you shouldn't need to mod-in basic tenants of UX design.
- Finally, labor management is better than vanilla DF but still has a ways to go, especially when it comes to understanding and analyzing who would do well at a certain job (apart from skill levels). Dwarf Therapist remains a largely essential third-party application for those who want to feel like they know what they're doing.
And now for the pros
- Dwarf Fortress, DFSE or not, is the most richly detailed, intimately simulated and imagination-triggering game I've ever played. DFSE retains this quality. You may have heard of the incredible stories that come out of this game. They're quite real. Give DF a bit of your suspension of disbelief and it'll reward you beyond your imagination. (My current fort, for example, is full of punk goth dwarves who worship 'The Future', a deity of death, reincarnation and suffering, and who collectively decided an image of the Grim Reaper would be the icon of their civilization).
- The pixel art is a great fit for DFSE, and really helps you connect with what's happening inside your game. It's still working within the limitation of the tile-based graphics, but the boundaries of that limitation have been pushed beyond apparent limits with a lot of time, love and craft. Same goes for the music engine.
- In a world where $30 microtransactions for a funny robo suit re-color exist, DFSE is amazing bang for your buck. Vanilla DF (for free) was amazing value, and adding the reasonably low price tag doesn't change this that much.
- The improvements to work orders management make semi-automating the less 'interesting' aspects of larger forts much easier and really improves face-on-game contact.
- Incredible replay potential and variety at your fingertips. Make your world the way you find most interesting then suffer the consequences - err, I mean, pursue settling a fortress bounded in nature by little more than your ingenuity and design. A fortress which will totally survive. Promise.
- Dwarf Fortress has a heart. It's a labor of love, it's artwork, it's enshrined at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it's made from a place of real passion. You will never worry that some empty, souless will force Bay12 to add in micro-transactions, 'surprise mechanics' or measures designed to take advantage of 'marketing research', or otherwise pull DFSE from the gaming community because it didn't make enough money.