Reviews “If you fancy a modern Dungeon Keeper, War for the Overworld continues to be the best of the bunch.” PC Gamer “It’s evident this game was made with nothing but love for the series it’s so shamelessly inspired.

I don’t really want to spend most of my Dungeons 2 review discussing the mobile “game”/extortion attempt/mockery that EA put out a few years back and in order to prey on people’s nostalgia for the classic PC game. Mainly because I never want to think about that piece of garbage ever again.So I won’t.

Suffice it to say, Dungeons 2 is better than that pseudo- Dungeon Keeper racket.But that bar couldn’t be lower if the person holding the bar got stabbed in the gut by EA, fell down a conveniently placed flight of stairs into a basement, and then carried the bar six feet further down into a freshly-dug grave.Is Dungeons 2 any good not just in comparison, but on its own? Ah, now that’s the real question.Pat head, rub stomachDungeons 2 is interesting because it’s not solely a Dungeon Keeper imitator.There is a Dungeon Keeper element, and inevitably that’s the part that’ll draw people to the game. Playing the part of the disembodied Ultimate Evil, you’re charged with building out an underground lair to help plot your revenge. With the help of a trusty portal-straight-to-hell you’ll hire minions to do all the work your ghostly self cannot do—dig out rooms for treasure, rooms for brewing beer, rooms for researching traps, and et cetera.But this underground element is merely your base of operations.

Bring your minions aboveground and the indirect god-game control that comes with any Dungeon Keeper-esque title is replaced by direct, RTS-style controls and combat.You know that old 'spinning plates' carnival trick? The one where there are a bunch of plates balanced on thin wooden rods and it's all some poor guy can do to run up and down the line of them, tapping each one in turn to keep the whole group spinning?That's sort of how Dungeons 2 feels.It's like twelve different systems, all running in real-time, all equally important, all of which need your attention simultaneously. Maybe you’re busy managing your troops aboveground. That’s fine—except that underground you’ve forgotten to zone more rooms for excavation, your research room is backed up and its crew bored, your treasury is empty, and while you’ve researched how to build hospitals you still haven’t built one.You flip to the underground view to try and rectify some of these issues, and you succeed—except now two of your aboveground units were killed off while you were busy. And to top it all off, now a group of enemies are infiltrating your dungeon and you don’t have any troops belowground to kill them off with.

Hopefully your traps holdThis is Dungeons 2 at its best—a frantic scramble between two different games, like trying to play chess against a grandmaster at the same time you’re competing in a Twister tournament. Dungeons 2 isn’t exactly shy about its inspirations, but it doesn’t need to be. Just like Darksiders shamelessly flaunts its Zelda inspirations, Dungeons 2 gets to be cavalier about where it’s ripping ideas from because it uses those ideas in new and interesting ways. It’s two very safe, derivative concepts ( Dungeon Keeper and an RTS) that when combined present new challenges.Unfortunately, there’s a compromise: Dungeons 2 is neither a great RTS nor a great Dungeon Keeper game. It’s just “pretty good” at both.As Ron Swanson once said on Parks and Rec: “Don’t half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” I’m not sure I completely agree—there’s a brilliance to the underlying concept of Dungeons 2, and I’m glad the game exists.But the problem with Dungeons 2 is that neither the RTS side of things nor the dungeon management side has any real depth. On the dungeon side this manifests as a lack of rooms.

I often finished levels with massive amounts of empty space, because I just didn’t need a second treasure room or a second hospital or a second brewery or what have you—to say nothing of the fact that Dungeons 2 barely even tries to innovate on the Dungeon Keeper formula. On the RTS side, combat relies more on throwing enemies into the grinder than it does on strategy and micromanaging.The problem is exacerbated once you leave the campaign’s training wheels behind. The Dungeons 2 campaign is actually kind of brilliant because it masks the game’s biggest problem—when you run out of things to do, you can ascribe it to the level’s built-in constraints. Play a normal singleplayer match though and you’ll quickly reach the same impasse, and this time it’s not because the game’s holding something back. There’s just not a ton of depth.It’s not too surprising.

If either side were as fully-featured as your standard RTS or Dungeon Keeper imitator, there’s no way a player could pay attention to both sides. Era of celestials game online. The problem is the initial challenge of managing both your dungeon and your aboveground troops is all-too-quickly replaced by the feeling you’re knocking against the game’s skill ceiling.There are a few other knocks I have against the game—namely, that the dungeon controls are super picky and imprecise, which is all the more noticeable when you come back from the tight RTS controls in the other half of the game. Also, the UI is cluttered and often completely obtuse. Why, for instance, do I need a separate menu for “Rooms” and “Production Rooms”?And on the other side of the scale, I’d be remiss not to mention the game’s solid writing.

“The vision for the original Dungeons was to create a game that provided a ruleset and framework to explain, examine, and explore the usual layouts for dungeons in RPG games,” explains Christian Wolfertstetter, creative director at Realmforge. “Those dungeons are usually designed in a way to make them challenging—but not deadly. So the first Dungeons was really all about satisfying the needs of different classes and levels of heroes, which actually made it more of a Theme Park-style management game.”It was a unique concept, though Wolfertstetter admits that it did have some usability problems and needed an extra level of polish. He believes, however, that the main source of players’ disappointment was that it was such a different direction from Dungeon Keeper. They wanted a modern follow-up, and that wasn’t Dungeons“We were really surprised at the time, just because the gameplay was so different between the two titles,” Wolfertstetter recalls. “But the thing was that Dungeons had a similar look, especially in screenshots, and it turned out that a lot of players at the time had been waiting for a spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper.

In retrospect, we should have expected those comparisons and expectations.”Through trailers and previews, Realmforge did try to show how Dungeons was aiming to be something different, but the hunger for a new Dungeon Keeper was too strong, leading to a disappointing ‘mixed’ user review score on Steam. Instead of driving Realmforge away from the genre, however, this made them determined to give players something closer to what they’d hoped Dungeons would be.“Once we became aware of that demand for a modern game that followed the Dungeon Keeper template, we scrapped the ‘hero entertainment’ aspect for Dungeons 2,” says Wolfertstetter.

“Instead we focused on a more classical approach.”Dungeons 2, then, was a totally different experience, drawing more on Dungeon Keeper, but with nods to other classic RTS games like Warcraft 3. Instead of creating dungeons to challenge heroes, players were tasked with conquering the underworld and overworld through a mix of dungeon management and RTS battles. It resonated with players a lot more than its predecessor, sparking another sequel, the recently launched Dungeons 3.

The conquest continuesLike Dungeons 2, the latest game is split into two distinct parts: the underworld management game and the overworld RTS. In the former, minions can be ordered—by literally grabbing them with the ‘Hand of Terror’—to carve out tunnels, build new rooms, and place traps for invading heroes; they also go about their own routines, sleeping, drinking beer, and getting paid. “Just like a game designer,” Wolfertstetter jokes.The overworld portion is where the Warcraft 3 inspiration comes in.

Creatures recruited in the dungeon can be sent to duke it out with the forces of good above ground, where they’re entirely under player control.Though the game’s two halves evoke very different strategy games, they are still inextricably linked. Conquering the overworld generates ‘evilness’, a resource that can be spent on researching new traps and rooms for the dungeon. Creatures start making more demands as they increase in level, potentially going on strike and refusing to fight. Both sides need equal attention, though they do require different skillsets. Wolfertstetter doesn’t think that makes Dungeons 3 any less accessible, however.“Dungeons 3 is not a hard game to learn. The developers here at Realmforge are too old to keep up with pro games like Starcraft and the difficulty of Dungeons 3 reflects that. Joking aside, I think both parts of Dungeons are very accessible and I have yet to see a player that couldn’t handle it.”While Dungeons 3’s direction is close to its predecessor’s, Realmforge has used the sequel to refine and improve as much as possible.

“There’s double the amount of content compared to Dungeons 2. We’ve also introduced co-op support across all game modes, which everyone here has had a lot of fun with. All the various factions have been brought together too, which we think is a big improvement.

We also tweaked the research mechanics, moving all researchable items from multiple menus into one big tech tree—and added new ones, of course.”There’s a long list of tweaks and new features, including a few favorites from Dungeon Keeper, like imprisoning and torturing heroes, or even turning them into undead minions. While Bullfrog’s classic remains a major inspiration, Dungeons 3 isn’t beholden to it; certainly not when half of the game is an RTS, with all the army and resource management that comes along with it. It also introduces random dungeons for the first time in the series. The campaign maps and a few multiplayer maps are hand-crafted, but skirmish and random multiplayer maps are procedurally generated using blueprints created by the level designers.All of this has paid off, netting Dungeons 3 the best critical and user reception of the series so far, but where can the series go after conquering both the underworld and the overworld?

As it turns out, lots of places. Realmforge has no dearth of ideas when it comes to the series’ future.“Well, the Dungeons multiverse has a lot to offer, like new worlds, new races,” Wolfertstetter says. “There are still some good gods refusing to accept the reign of evil, and there’s the Final Frontier We are still working on Dungeons 3, so definitely expect new things to come eventually. However, I’m afraid I can’t tell you any details because the Hand of Publishing will slap me if I do.”In the meantime, Wolfertstetter and Realmforge are just enjoying the positive feedback, as well as being vindicated in their belief that the series was worth nurturing. “I think Dungeons 3 is definitely pushing the series another step in the right direction.”Dungeons 3 is out now on Steam.Sponsored posts are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked.

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