After recently playing Dungeon Keeper 2, I thought I’d try a game inspired by it. Dungeons 2 takes a lot from the Dungeon Keeper 2 gameplay, but has its own ideas which makes it feel a bit confused. The dungeon part plays like a simpler Dungeon Keeper, but there’s also an overworld where it plays like a real-time strategy.
You are the “Ultimate Evil” who has been previously defeated by a group of heroes but now is gaining power and planning his revenge whilst in a spirit-like form. This will be inspired by Lord of the Ring’s Sauron. The game has a narrator just like Dungeon Keeper but is even more chatty (there is an option to lower the frequency if you wish), and the sarcastic humour is more extreme. It’s the same voice actor as The Stanley Parable. The dialogue has references to the likes of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones.
Instead of your creatures joining your army via a portal (like Dungeon Keeper), you just hire them directly but this costs gold. Your army will want to drink beer and be paid. They don't need to rest, so there’s no “Lair”. There is a Hospital where they can recover their health though.
There’s fewer rooms to build but they seem more pricey. Not only do you have to zone them out, but most don’t function unless you put a “work unit” in the room (eg the Brewery needs a “kettle”), but these are often pricey, so you can end up zoning a room out then not having the cash to complete it. Some rooms require research which is also pricey. So when you feel the need for a room, you have to wait to amass a large amount of gold, but there will be many “pay days” while you are doing this, so there’s many frustrating times where you are about to have the required gold, then your creatures take it.
There’s some room and creature upgrades too which are also pricey. Population cap can be increased but it is also pricey. Since all these things cost a fair amount of gold; this slows down the pace of the game.
Trolls work in the Forge on upgrades for your creatures. These upgrades take ages, and is problematic when the Trolls love walking off to do something else, and their movement is very slow, so it takes ages for them to get back to the Forge.
I thought the interface could do with some tweaks. The rooms are split under two menus (Rooms, and Production) and I felt like they didn’t need to be. It was quite confusing where to click to bring up the create unit menu, or where to do research. You have to locate and click the specific room, but not click one of your units or any resource that is in the room (otherwise you pick that up). Research should be accessible from a global menu, and allow you to easily queue it.
There’s a few designated entrances to your dungeon which enemies can enter. It’s handy to place a few traps down to do some initial damage before your creatures finish them off. I think these designated entrances make the game easier because you are only defending specific areas that you know up front. In Dungeon Keeper, you have to be careful where you are digging as you can create additional problems.
Whilst in the dungeon, you can pick up and drop your creatures. Since you own your full dungeon map, there’s no restrictions so you can drop them right at the entrance when the enemies come in. Dropping creatures in your Throne Room to defend it is risky because you may accidentally sacrifice them instead.
To go to the overworld, you can pick up your creatures and drop them at these entrances. When you are in the overworld, the gameplay changes to an RTS. This is a bit weird because the controls change. You cannot pick up your creatures, but now you can drag-select and right-click to guide them. It is quite a slow, basic RTS and only deals with combat - you don’t build on the surface. You can create groups with ctrl+number like you can in games of Age of Empires.
The aim of each mission is often to destroy a city, or the main hero unit. Along the way, you are often instructed to destroy a few camps. There’s not much choice or strategy here - it is pretty linear. You can’t attack the main city until the game wants you to because the door will be locked and it won’t unlock until you do the sub-objectives.
I often found myself repeating the same sequence of moves: sending my army to the overworld, dealing a bit of damage, retreating back to heal, defending my dungeon from a raid, waiting to heal, then going back to the overworld. Some scenarios seemed very grindy in that regard, and it was a matter of time before I was victorious without anything happening to force me to break out of that sequence.
Some maps have caves which means there are 3 maps that you are moving between - so it can get a bit fiddly. You can’t have a large army due to the population limits, so taking them all to the surface leaves your dungeon exposed. Leaving some behind means it’s harder to defeat enemies.
I feel like Dungeons 2 has all the basic mechanics for a decent game, but several mechanics need tweaking to make it more fun, more strategic, and less cumbersome. Lowering the cost of room tiles, lowering some of the costs of research, make the enemy raids less scripted (they seem to occur at a regular timed interval), and allowing more freedom on how to attack the enemy would be the initial changes. It doesn’t need to be the same game as Dungeon Keeper, but I feel like the ideas they have had have made the formula worse.