This game is supposed to be the spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper, but so far it fails fairly hard at it. I'm only a few levels in and I'm getting epically annoyed at the interface. It's cluttered beyond belief, there's too much stuff to keep track of, the game doesn't pause when you open up menus either apparently.

The whole idea is to get heroes into your dungeon, amuse them, let them loot your gold/or your armory/library, kill a few enemies, and then kill them before they get out, and drag them to be tortured. What you can place, gimmicks, to amuse them is extremely limited. Prison cages freestanding or wall mounted, a few different light sources, various wall art/gargoyle heads, and a few other misc mood setting items. That's it so far unless as you go farther in they totally change everything, but I doubt it, as the first level everything is unlocked for you.

So the heroes come in via entrances you open up, and you have to stop them from leaving again. That's the only thing you do as a dungeon lord, other then direct your goblins where to dig to get to preplaced rooms, and placing pentagrams to allow your monsters to spawn, and then barely move away from that spawn. Occasionally you'll have a monster raiding party from your boss show up to fuck with you, and you'll have to kill those before they kill your dungeon heart (yet another thing they were "inspired" by Dungeon Keeper on) So once you open the entrances, you're doomed to a half hour of running around like a chicken with his head chopped off, because the heroes flood in so fast that it's a bitch keeping up with them. I opened two entrances, and I was instantly pissed to the point I shut the game off. A hero has escaped with your gold! every minute and a half had me raging.

Maybe there's a way to make managing your units better, but I haven't seen hotkeys to allow me to go straight back to the Lord other then the possession spell, which is annoying to me to use. When you're in a dungeon this big, not being able to move around easily to where you need to go is aggravating.
http://static.gamesradar.com/images...ns_screenshot11--screenshot_viewer_medium.jpg

Graphically the game looks like shit, even on all maxed settings, like the graphics are 5-6 years out of date, if not more. Zoomed way out, it's not obvious, zoom in, and it looks like crap
http://static.gamesradar.com/images...ns_screenshot07--screenshot_viewer_medium.jpg

There's a skill tree and attributes to make your guy stronger at killing heroes, and judging by the first level it can turn him into a badass. But you're still just running from one end of the map to the other every 2 minutes to kill the new hero. The magic spells have a nasty delay on when they actually get cast after you click them, and I can't seem to figure out a few of them. They might be passive buffs, but there's no way to tell if they're doing anything.

The Dungeon Keeper references made me wish I was playing DK2, and hell they even threw in a Diablo reference, making fun of him for his dungeons and his inability to finish off the heroes once he gets them in his dungeon. So so far, bad, bad controls, bad graphics, and boring gameplay that you see almost all of with the first 30 minutes. I hope as time goes on it gets funny like DK did, otherwise I just don't see any point.

Initial impression 30/100

 

The first few patches really overhauled shit, and made it possible to get a fuckton of extra skill points. Putting some points into the running speed skills and the speed spell and you can blaze from one corner of the dungeon to the other at ridiculous speeds.

And I'm almost positive there is a button to zoom right to the keeper lord, but can't remember where it is.

Anyone going into this hoping for Dungeon Keeper 3 is gonna be sorely disappointed. It takes a fair bit of inspiration from it, but at the end of the day it's more like SimGygax than anything else. Fun, but not what I was hoping for.

 

Using patch 1.2 atm. The skill point additions, you mean the entire screen full of challenges that show up when you start a level? Going to look more into the controls for the game shortly, there's a fuckton of them for what should be a fairly straightforward deal.

I'd call it inspired from DK2 if it was more like it, as is, it's just Whack-a-Hero.

 

Nah, only the top few give you skill points, and they're fairly straightforward. All the rest of them just give you scrolls for one-off spells.

 

The zoom to the Lord was the End key.

I give up on this pile of shit. I played it for awhile more, and it's literally a hero farming sim. Place shiny objects on your walls to make them go in deeper, throw gold out every few steps, step around the corner to bash their heads in. That's the entire game. Boring, uninspired, shameless ripoff of Dungeon Keeper, minus the funny, minus the entertainment.

10/100

 

Wish I could disagree. I had such high hopes.

Time to reinstall Evil Genius, I guess.

 

I keep seeing mention of that in reviews, I'll check that game out next. This whole game left me with the feeling that the game could of just been a facebook game, if it had slightly worse graphics. I know there's a Dungeon Overlord game that does similar to Dungeon Keeper on FB already.