Dungeon Keeper Series

Published: 27 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024

Dungeon Keeper

Dungeon Keeper Steam banner

One of my favourite games of all time, a really unique blending of genres (RTS, Management Sim and God Game) with a fantastic atmosphere and attitude of “Its good to be bad” that has been oft copied and yet never bettered.

Are there flaws? Yes, of course, the base game balancing is all over the place, and the blending of RTS and Management complements the game well but means their individual mechanics are rather rudimentary. However, honestly? I couldn’t care less when I’m having a blast digging out a dungeon, training my creatures and eventually getting the Lord of the Land’s head on a spike. Game is an absolute blast to play, and easiest its ever been with the fan patch/expansion KeeperFX keeping this game alive all these years later.

Dungeon Keeper 2

Dungeon Keeper 2 Steam banner

I’ve always had complicated thoughts on DK2, and I’ve always found it difficult to critique - I love DK1 to bits, but despite playing it for hundreds of hours I’d struggle to fully explain why it works, and judging from its absolutely byzantine development history, I’m not sure the devs fully understood either. It’s a perfect storm that all, somehow, comes together. How do you improve on that though?

Well I think DK2 makes a good stab at it, retaining a lot of core gameplay loop while adding in sensible evolutions, such as the mana system, introducing a sandbox mode (My Pet Dungeon) and jumping into the graphical world of full 3D etc. and on this front the game makes, while not perfect (making the talismanic Horned Reaper into a spell was an awful idea), good progress on being less idiosyncratic than its predecessor.

However, I feel as if the core gameplay loop that DK1 pulls off so well, is again here, just weaker in almost every aspect. Some of which is obvious, the game is glacially slow, and some less obvious, like the creature lineup (Where’d the Dragons, Orcs, and Samurai go?) and variation being overall more homogeneous and, in my opinion, weaker.
DK1 was very idiosyncratic at times and all over the place with balancing and design issues, but I’m much more confident in overlooking them - I cannot unfortunately say the same about DK2.

I don’t want to get the impression that I think this game is in any way awful, no, it looks, works, and functions as a perfectly serviceable Dungeon Keeper game, it just looks mediocre when compared to its predecessor. Perhaps the EA acquisition of Bullfrog and subsequent departure of Peter Molyneux had a significant influence?

I would still recommend checking it out anyway, I still enjoyed playing through and beating the campaign once again despite my issues with it, confirming that beyond curiosity/nostalgia, I’d stick with the original. There’s a critical lack of Dungeon Keeper games, especially after DK3 was shitcanned thanks to EA absorbing/killing off Bullfrog. Thanks EA.