An simple RTS with lots of theme, flavor, and needless micromanagement
Second thing I've learned: control is really important. Yes, I'm saying this again. It's one thing when a platformer that requires precision jumping has imprecise controls. It's a bit different for a strategy game that lives and breathes on "clicks per minute."
Impire's story is a big hanging lampshade for dungeon crawlers. The game opens with an evil wizard binding the demon Baal into his service, complete with evil monologue about he'll eventually take over the world and get revenge on all the fools who mocked him. He tasks Baal with building up an evil underground base of operations to commit minor acts of evil on the populace that rejected him, making it very clear that we are evil and don't you dare tell me that we're not or I'll evil you in the face. The game's munchkin humor is actually good for a chuckle, and the cartoonish art and animation add to that goofiness.
I haven't played Dungeon Keeper or Overlord, but I get the sense that Impire is doing something different from those older sim builder games by hewing closer to real-time strategy. You start the game by recruiting peons and adding rooms to your dungeon - a barracks for summoning units, a kitchen for healing them, an armory for building traps and upgrades, and so on. Like a single-player Starcraft campaign, battles are waged on two fronts - you send your team to complete objectives in the map outside your base, but you also need to defend against mercenaries that raid your camp for gold and experience points. This requires crafting an engine of rooms that quickly heal your surviving units and train new ones after each skirmish.
So let me explain that part about control. Here's a day in the life of a Starcraft campaign: I select my armory and have it research an armor upgrade, then have my barracks train marines with those improvements. I click-and-drag over a group of units to highlight them, click the map to give them a destination, and they stay in formation as they move, useful so that the medics stay in the back. When I meet an enemy squad, I double-click on a marine, highlighting every marine, and order them all to stim-pack and focus fire on one target at a time. I don't know of any other modern RTS that hasn't figured these basic commands out. In Impire, I cannot double-click a unit to highlight multiple units, I cannot issue orders to multiple units simultaneously, and new units do not appear with their upgrades pre-installed, and the difference is inexplicably huge.
Now here's a day in the life of my imp. I'm in a battle and lose a few units, so I now have openings to summon more. I open the creation menu and select the units that I want to pop. Then I open an army menu with a portrait for each unit. I click on one of the new units and press a button that sends it to the training room. Once it trains to level 2, I can click another button to send it an armor upgrade. Then I open the movement slider for that unit and select "Follow Baal" so that it follows my hero unit. I will do this for every new unit that I summon. Every. Single. One.
I send Baal into enemy territory, with his merry band of misfits behind him. I move Baal forward by clicking waypoints on the ground, except that I hold the mouse button down slightly too long and open a pop-up menu instead. I have to click three more times just to get Baal to walk forward without the menu appearing. I find enemies in the next room, and my guys rush in to fight. Apparently my ranged units were walking ahead in the formation, with no way for me to stick them to the back, so I lose a couple weaker units in the initial stage of the brawl. I click-and-drag everyone into a group and try to make them focus fire, but I can't target enemy units as they're buried in a mess of animated limbs, so I have to let units target whatever's closest and hope for the best. After the fight, I click on each injured unit individually and press the "eat" button to send them back to the kitchen, one at a time.
A warning message appears - ladders are popping up in the dungeon, signaling an incoming invasion. I can only summon about 20 units, and I need almost all of them on the go with me so that I'm strong enough to fight stronger enemies. There's also a limit on the number of traps I can set at home, and my dungeon is too big to trap every hallway. I also can't ignore the assault - if the invasion reaches a treasure room, the level ends immediately. So I don't have enough patrols or traps to solve problems without teleporting my units home, sending a group to check each ladder. If I quickly destroy the ladders, the invaders will show up at my front door instead, which is the place I set most of my traps. But with the wonky routing and sending, I can't get my team home soon enough, so a band of adventurers drops down a ladder. I either cross my fingers that one team of units will be enough to fight back, or I teleport every unit I've got to help. And then I send each survivor to heal and retrain each replacement individually.
Part of what keeps the game playable are assignable squads. On the units menu, I can put up to four units into my first squad, and I get more squad slots as I expand the dungeon. I can order these squads around as a single unit, including orders to go back home and eat or teleportations. It's much easier to deal with the ladders by teleporting a squad onto each one. This doesn't eliminate my issues with the game, though, since only about half of my units can be grouped at a time. I might improve my micro game by specializing - a squad of tanks that I can send in first, a squad of ranged units to stand in back, and so on. But then I would lose the utility of sending balanced teams home to fight the ladders, or I would have to repeatedly rearrange squads and add even more mouse clicks to the game.
It's not like Impire raised my blood pressure in a substantial way. From a distance, the game is a cute, casual RTS with a lot of theme and solid basic ideas, and it looks like it doesn't lack for content. It's just that at time of writing, I had logged seven hours of play and completed only three maps. This either means that I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder for backtracking, or the game is throwing an epic amount of needless busywork at me. Battles don't feel tense and dramatic - they feel like stilted zerg-rushes where I can't control what's going on. The home invasions don't add depth - I don't have enough units to divide between offense and defense, so keeping the garden trimmed and weeded just feels like a speed bump. You could probably take the game as it is, fiddle with the UI and unit limits, and create something interesting. As it stands now, I'm clicking too many buttons to play too little game.