Preview by: William Abner

It’s impossible to talk about Dungeons, the upcoming strategy game from Kalypso Media, without also mentioning Bullfrog’s classic Dungeon Keeper. The two games are strikingly similar. You play the role of an evil dungeon master bent on smacking around the heroes foolish enough to enter your realm.

To be fair, it’s important to note that this is not a “remake” of Dungeon Keeper – this is certainly its own game. There are a few twists here to the Dungeon Keeper formula—most notably that Dungeons is less about training your underlings and more about luring in tougher and tougher heroes….and slaying them.

While the ultimate goal for the AI controlled heroes is to rob you blind and to destroy your “dungeon heart”, you, as dungeon master, are trying to kill the heroes – but not too soon. You want to get them all fat and happy first. You do this by enticing them into your dungeon.

The heroes all have unique goals or in other words things that feed their greed to sack the dungeon. Some like gold, others like books, others like to fight monsters, etc. There are ten “classes” of heroes and you’ll get to bash them with up to 15 different monsters during the 20 mission campaign.

As the heroes enter your dungeon they will start messing the place up. This is a good thing, actually – as by doing so they start to accumulate Soul Energy. This energy is the key to your overall success in the game. It’s basically the game’s resource for you to decorate and populate the dungeon with cool stuff, (cool for a dungeon, anyway. You know: torture chambers, racks, skull spikes, etc) which leads to more heroes willing to attempt to sack it. So you want these heroes to get a false sense of security by looting, pillaging, killing, and generally causing mayhem in your painstakingly constructed dungeon lair. Think of it like Sir Robin at the end of Holy Grail saying, “That’s easy!” only to get tossed over the bridge to his doom. Same idea. Only in a dungeon.

The trick, then, is to feed the heroes’ ego by letting them go hog wild, gaining more and more Soul Energy – but not so much that they reach your inner sanctum and destroy the dungeon heart because if they do – turn out the lights…the party is over.