Dungeons

Reviewed and available exclusively on PC

The unfortunate thing about Dungeons is that the developers really came up with a unique gameplay concept, and then dressed it up like Dungeon Keeper. This has led to scathing user feedback, and in some cases, poor press reviews. The reality is that with some extra polish, and expanded gameplay, we could have been looking at a real classic. Instead, we have a game which might lay a good foundation for a more thorough sequel, but in itself lacks serious appeal.

If anything, Dungeons resembles a combination of a classic tower defence game with a management title. The basic premise: You control an evil overlord in avatar form as he peruses his dungeons, luring wide-eyed and bushy-tailed heroes into his tunnel network before slaying them. However, it is not that simple.

First of all, there are different currency types in Dungeons: gold, soul points and prestige. All three are earned in different ways, and have different uses. Gold is the easiest to get hold of, and can be farmed by mining with your Goblins, or killing heroes with your overlord.

Soul points are trickier, and earning these becomes one of the game’s primary motivators. When you start a level, heroes will steadily begin visiting your dungeon. Heroes will have desires, and fulfilling these desires will cause them to accumulate soul points. Defeating them in combat before locking them up in one of your prison cells allows you to slowly harvest the soul points they accumulated in your dungeon.

Early on, heroes will simply want to gather gold, so laying out piles of gold is an easy way to satisfy them. When they find the pile, they will crouch and begin stuffing their pockets, causing their soul point meter to fill. When it is full, they will typically try to leave your dungeon. If they leave before you defeat them in combat, they escape with your gold, so the idea is to use your overlord to kill the heroes as their soul point meter maxes out.

This becomes progressively more complicated, as different heroes will need different things to accumulate soul points. In this regard, the game is much like a classic management sim, where your objective is to accommodate customers and keep them happy. The difference is that in Dungeons, once they are happy, you capture them and harvest their souls.

You will have to expand the reach of your dungeon. This is achieved by placing, or overtaking pentagrams. Not only will these pentagrams extend the borders of your dungeon, but they will spawn monsters to fight for you. These come in different varieties, and levelling your monsters up is important if you want them to pose any challenge to invading heroes. Fighting monsters in your dungeon gives heroes soul points, so strategic placement of pentagram spawning locations is imperative to earning these.

Your monsters will rarely defeat invading heroes on their own, and should be seen more as sacrificial playthings for them to kill, and therefore accumulate soul points before you swoop in and harvest the rewards.

Then there is prestige, which you can increase by placing prestige objects. These cost soul points, and include wall hangings and various ornaments. Placing these in your dungeon directly increases your prestige, and the higher this is, the higher level heroes you will draw to your dungeon. Higher level heroes are tougher to kill, but contain a lot more soul point potential. Many items and abilities also have a prestige level requirement, so it is important to constantly be buying new prestige items for your dungeon. Strategic placement of prestige objects is also important, as they impress heroes and can be used to lead them in certain directions.

If you do not have enough prestige items in your dungeons, heroes may become bored and even attack your dungeon heart, and if they destroy it then it’s game over.

Then there is the RPG component of the game. Each mission you complete has specific tasks which you can perform along the way to the primary objective. Performing these tasks grants you skill points, which can be used to upgrade your avatar’s abilities and stats. Your avatar is already extremely powerful, but beefing him up is useful for certain boss fights or particularly difficult encounters.

We have to praise Dungeons for its unique and innovative gameplay design. The packaging could have been better though, and I’m not just referring to the blatant Dungeon Keeper-esque visuals. While the graphics are crisp enough, they are nothing special. The sound is also pleasant, with some fairly decent voice acting counterpoised by some absolutely terrible voice acting.

In terms of presentation, it ultimately ends up somewhere around the average mark, leaning towards good. Problems with the interface, however, mar the experience somewhat. First off, the control design leaves something to be desired. While the game requires you to manage and build a dungeon as well as place items, you are always in control of your avatar who you control directly by clicking around the map. This can get a little confusing in the beginning, but it does get a bit easier after a while. Still, a more seamless and ingenious system would be required to really do the gameplay justice. Dungeons is also a little buggy, with some dodgy click registration, and occasionally poor AI. We also experienced a few system lockups during our experience, as well as other odd anomalies.

The biggest problem for Dungeons is longevity. There is only a single player component, and the game runs out of fresh ideas at around 6 hours in. Thereafter it simply rehashes gameplay while systematically increasing the difficulty. Unfortunately, we play these games to explore content. Classic management titles, such as Theme Hospital or RollerCoaster Tycoon, constantly introduce new content in the form of items or structures until the very end. You might find yourself losing interest a few hours in when it becomes clear that Dungeons has shown all its cards, and there is still a way to go in the campaign.

An online competitive component could also have helped to alleviate this, as the gameplay would have lent itself well to multiplayer. Unfortunately, the package feels just a little empty with just yourself to play with.

Overall, Dungeons is a good game. Beyond some cheeky references, it bears very little resemblance to the gameplay found in Dungeon Keeper, but if you can get past that you will find a unique and relatively fresh concept. Unfortunately, it lacks a bit of polish and runs out of steam after a while, making it worth the R200 price tag for fans of the strategy/management genre, but by no means an essential purchase.

Discuss Dungeons in the forums