Dungeons: Being a Dungeon Lord ain’t all fun and games

Dungeons, the sequel to the 90’s classic Dungeon Keeper, is a sim-management game that sets the player as a Dungeon Lord who must design their foul, evil cave of despair to entince in heroes... before brutally murdering them at their peak to steal their ‘soul energy’. The idea is basic enough; your dungeon is made more tempting by artefacts, monsters and traps. In order to buy more of these you must harvest more and more soul energy from captured heroes.

Different heroes are interested in different things. Some enjoy looting and stealing treasure, whereas others get a kick out of avoiding traps or fighting monsters. Therefore, it is important to have a good mixture of both gold piles and monsters in order to keep all the heroes interested. Heroes enter your dungeon through special gates and are led through your dungeon by artefacts that you own which attract their attention. As they wander through, they find your piles of gold or monsters and begin fighting or looting at their will. You then must watch carefully as their interest bar fills up so that you can kill them and take their soul energy when it’s full.

The types of monster you have depend on the monsters you can find in the area around your dungeon. You can search for new types of monster and by placing a pentagram near their habitat you can start to spawn that type into your dungeon. However, there’s a limit on the number of pentagrams you can place, and it’s infuriatingly low meaning that you can only have a very small number of monsters present in your dungeon. This very quickly becomes an issue as heroes enter every two or three minutes and each of them is strong enough to kill all your monsters. As you can imagine this makes it very difficult to maintain the interest of heroes that like fighting monsters, and the game slows down a lot as it becomes so challenging to build up soul energy.

Often it can take hours to get through certain levels and considering that you aren’t directly doing anything this makes the game unbelievably dull at times. Not only that, but pentagrams must be built on the edges of your territory in order to expand, so monsters end up out of the way rather than being somewhere useful in your dungeon.

Monsters are not controllable, which means they stick to their pentagram and do not make any impression on the heroes unless the heroes start fighting them. It’s too easy for heroes to breeze through your dungeon with little risk at all. The entire burden of looking after the dungeon comes down to your Dungeon Lord – the only controllable character in the game. This would be all well and good were it not for the fact that often even the most basic hero can take out your lord with relative ease. So, as the heroes level up it becomes almost impossible to gather soul energy and progress in the game.

There are also a very limited amount of choices in Dungeons. The monsters are limited to what you find in the level, and the number of pentagrams you can set. There are three types of building, two to keep the heroes interested (libraries and armouries) and one to drain more soul energy from them (prisons). For a management game this is an unbelievably poor amount of choice.

The main problem with this game is how unbalanced the campaign is. The difficulty increases far too quickly with little progression is useful items, traps or monsters. By the third level I was already getting annoyed with how many times I had to restart, and how hard it was to keep heroes interested. With heroes being sent in every three minutes or so, random tasks being set involving ridiculous requirements (usually involving sending all your money), failure penalties that hold you back – all this slows down the game even further.

However, when the game comes down to just designing dungeons (in sandbox mode) where you are rid of the stupid tasks, it is a lot more enjoyable. Having free reign over traps, monsters and artefacts really lets the game flow better and allows you to really do well at taking down heroes. In this version of the game it is easy to get distracted for ages. Unfortunately, this really doesn’t make up for just how awful the campaign is.

In all, the game presents a good idea, and it could have worked really well. It’s just a shame that the campaign expects so much of players right from the beginning and causes pure frustration. Had the campaign been more similar to that of the free style mode then I could easily have seen it being a much more enjoyable game. But as it is, while the sandbox mode is a lot of fun in it’s own right, the campaign just felt like more effort than enjoyment – really not what I want in a game.

Dungeons is available now from Realmforge and Kalypso Media for PC, retailing at £29.99.