Review by: Jason McMaster

In My Lord 2, you play as an evil god, God of Destruction, who is worshipped by Badman. Badman is, well, a bad man with a weird sense of humor. You have to dig tunnels for him to hide from the good guys who are trying to drag him back to the surface so that justice may be served. Luckily, it doesn’t come down to just digging for our anti-hero’s protection.

At the beginning of each round, the player gets a certain amount of “dig power” to use creating this dungeon. Each square in the dungeon has properties for either a physical or spiritual monster. The simplest of these are the slimemoss and, for the magic creatures, spirit.

Once you’ve created a few of the simplest monsters, they start moving through your dungeon picking up and re-depositing the minerals from different blocks. Each block has a certain amount of minerals, or magic, and when the basic creatures have filled it to a certain saturation point it hatches into a more powerful creature. For instance, the Slimemoss is the basic, then the Omnom (a small, bug-like creature) and finally the Lizardman. The more complex monsters don’t carry minerals from square to square. In fact, they eat the simpler monsters. Thus the ecosystem behind My Lord 2 thrives. It’s roughly the same on the magic side, except you bear Liliths (witches) and demons or dragons, depending on the physical terrain surrounding their blocks.

You create your dungeon by digging tunnels and pathways for the enemies to explore. Each explorer has a built in direction that she will default to, followed by her second choice, then third and so on. Using this knowledge, you can separate the heroes so that they head alone into danger, but that won’t be enough. You’ll also have to design your dungeon to be a monster-friendly habitat so that you have enough forces to repel those stupid, good-guy jerks.

The real trick behind this game is making sure that your monsters move through the dungeon in such a way that they can have an advantage on the enemy while keeping the food chain thriving. Concentrating monsters in small areas that don’t allow for heroes to cast very damaging, explosive magic that can clear a larger room is one of the simpler, yet effective, strategies for your design.