Want to start using the corpses of your enemies to animate a few zombies? You’ll need a graveyard for that.īut now, you’ll only get so far if you stay underground and only peek outside when armed with seven shades of overkill. Want to start building traps to chip away at would-be defenders? You’ll need the machinery to produce it and the manpower to put it all in place. Your troops need to be housed, fed and maintained. You still need a constant supply of mined gold to pay wages or make purchases. Some of that remains the same: the construction of your lair and the smooth management of your numerous facilities continues to be the foundation of a worthwhile army of evilness.
In Dungeons II, you were free to lurk in your lair, building up your army and slaughtering the occasional band of heroes who journeyed into your depths in the name of goodness until you wanted to venture out. Now the two halves are more symbiotic and feel much more like a whole. Trying to juggle both aspects of the experience was a staple of the previous Dungeons game, but only up to an extent. Another introduces a day/night cycle that has you under siege from hardy foes by day, but sees them exhausted at night, allowing you to creep around relatively unchallenged while they slumber and you destroy all their stuff. Another asks you to collect various ingredients from both the under and overworld to sacrifice so that you can summon a new demon ally.
The only way to break their defences is to routinely hijack their food shipments until you starve them out and can put them to the sword. One early mission pits you against a fortified town filled with formidable gluttons. For one, there is a much greater number and variety of missions that often go above and beyond just having you patiently build an unstoppable force and roll over everything when the time’s right.
It would be a disservice to suggest that Dungeons III is just the second game with a few new maps lobbed in (especially when Dungeons II has that rarest of things genuinely good DLC campaign extensions that do just that without the need for a sequel). The second release tried to do more, by allowing your rampaging hoards to leave the murky underground and reign chaos on the world above. The initial release was a clumsy but honest tribute to Bullfrog’s fallen juggernaut that did little more than clumsily ape its inspiration. Games like Craft the World, Evil Genius and War for the Overworld are all worth a mention, but so too is the Dungeon series. While the founding title was cut down in its prime by a mixture of corporate greed and general incompetence (I’m not bitter), other titles have taken up the mantle from time to time to try to appeal to Keeper’s now nomadic fanbase.
The series and the genre it championed were forgotten about for decades, until an awful mobile port dripping with beloved EA staples like microtransactions came along to be derided by a sneering fanbase. Then EA came along and ruined a good thing, as EA are wont to do. Many hours were lost to malicious chuckling, a sequel was produced and loved by all, and evil overlords destroyed all that was good worldwide. So you diligently mined out rooms, produced traps and bulked up your army of goblins, spiders and ghosts to thwart them.
Developed by serial success artists, Bullfrog, Dungeon Keeper made you the bad guy, trapped you underground and released floods of do-gooders to pinch your gold and slaughter your troops. There was a time when Dungeon Keeper was a thing and everyone was happy about that.