Craft the world reminds allows you to build your own dwarf fortress. However, as with most games that combine creating a building/city/empire with fighting, most of your efforts will have to go into preparations for those fights.
Most of the time, you will give general orders (mine here, craft that item, build a door here), and then one of your around 12 dwarfs will come and do the job. However, you can also control dwarfs individually.
The crafting system reminds quite a bit of Minecraft, although with less freedom. And it is a bit annoying sometimes (go to the raw materials page and draw the wood button to the crafting field, go to the gear page and draw the axe button to the crafting field - since one has to do quite a bit of item crafting, this can really become annoying in the long run).
A second problem is that the job distribution among the dwarfs is not really optimal, especially when you explore a larger part of the map and have more than a couple of dwarfs. E.g. you order to mine a coal field and a dwarf is standing idly next to it, yet a dwarf from the other end of the map is given the task. Admittedly, Craft the World is not the only game with such job management problems.
And finally, it can take quite long to progress, as there are regular tasks you have to fulfill (mainly, getting sufficient food for the dwarfs and fending of the occasional monster wave). Nothing against such regular tasks to keep the fortress running, but I don't think it was properly balanced.
However, although there are a couple of drawbacks, the game is still quite a bit of fun, and since you will spend most of the time giving tasks without micromanaging the dwarfs, it can also be quite relaxing.