Review by: William Abner

I had such high hopes for this one. Quirky strategy games on the PC are my bread and butter and I was such a huge fan of Dungeon Keeper than anything even resembling the old girl gets me excited.

And make no mistake – it’s impossible to review Dungeons without mentioning the staple of this genre. Dungeons borrows so much from the old Bullfrog series but at the same time tries its best to do whatever it can to distinguish itself from it that it ends up being a mish-mosh of old ideas and new ones that never quite blend together; it all ends up rather messy in the end. Developer Realmforge bristles when its game is directly compared to Dungeon Keeper but look – when you build a game like this the comparisons are going to come so you had best learn to deal with it.

You play the role of Dungeon Lord, a really mean and evil fellow who is trying to knock off would be heroes and adventurers as they enter his lair and try to do things adventures do—in Dungeons this primarily means steal gold and ransack the place like a drunk college buddy. You have a bunch of worker imps (er...I mean goblins) and try to build a better mousetrap in order to make these do-gooders wish they’d stayed at home.

Sort of.

One of the tricky aspects of the game is the idea of “Soul Energy” – you need this stuff as it’s the game’s main resource. So it’s not good enough to just slap down heroes with an iron hand, you need them to enjoy themselves in the dungeon first…then smack them. At first, when previewing the game’s early build, this sounded like a novel idea, a neat spin on the old DK model. In practice, however, it grows to be exceedingly annoying as you have to continuously butter up heroes in specific ways before trying to lay the hammer down, and if a hero is bored inside your palace of doom he or she gets really agitated and seeks out your “Dungeon Heart” and if “team hero” ends up destroying it, you lose.

Laying down said hammer is also a chore because your creatures are usually no match for the now fat and happy (and powerful) heroes. In addition you can’t directly control your minions; you instead build summoning circles of a sort from which they spawn and hope they go in the right direction. This means you have to manually control the Dungeon Lord, putting out fires throughout your dungeon like a cartoon character who tries to be in four places at once.