Why do you always have to play the hero? Even playing a flawed hero is still playing the good guy on a quest to defeat the bad guys. Who wants to do that over and over again? Who, instead, wants to let their bad side free to dictate the way things go? Who wants to be a Dungeon Keeper?
Part real-time strategy, part simulation, Dungeon Keeper is all kinds of different. You play as an evil overlord whose Imp minions are mining out your dungeon so that you can fill it with nasties to protect yourselves from the inevitable visit from a hero hoping to prove himself.
Will you smartly scope out your surroundings and build on the strengths of your forces and the needs of the situation, or will you flail around like a useless imp?
Fun Times
"Set in the Realm of Joy, the people of Eversmile are plagued only by aching facial muscles, and not anthrax, as we had hoped." Thus begins Dungeon Keeper. You aren't the good guy here. You are most definitely an evil being who wishes to turn those upside-down frowns right side down, or something.
The overworld shows a series of maps, each increasing in difficulty and introducing new elements of the game to you. Our first introductory level has us mine some gold to pay for our work, redesign a few rooms so that we have somewhere to store the gold, and somewhere else to sleep, and somewhere else to grow chickens, obviously, and then have us defend the heart of our dungeon from evil intruders.
You'll only need to select the tool you want to use and click on the location you want to use it in in order to get anything done, and your imps will go about their business making it happen for you - as best as they can figure out.
Generally speaking, your imps will just get going, and the more they get going, the more you can get done with the rest of your dungeon - opening up routes to portals that spawn new monsters, and clearing rooms in which they can rest and train up and so on. If they aren't being impish enough for you, you can slap them with an empty hand and they'll get working faster, albeit with a slight hit to their health.
You can manhandle almost anything, it seems, so if a slap doesn't do it for you, just pick them up and chuck them further down the corridor, closer to their goal. They'll get the message then...
After a while, the heroes will find a way into your dungeon. They'll need to be dealt with before they destroy everything, so having some kind of defence in place is probably wise. My form of defence was an imp zerg rush and dumb luck, but it worked.
Frustrations
It worked, but I wasn't happy. I wasn't feeling Dungeon Keeper.
I liked the way it looked and what it was trying to do, but when I needed to know where something was, or I had to look at something in particular, the chaos just got in the way. By that, I mean two things: a sensitive camera and some spritely servants of evil.
The camera and mouse sensitivity can be dealt with, and the ability to rotate the camera for a better view of the action is welcomed. Having limited in-game light to see what's going on, and then having a screen full of icons, and headphones full of narrators yelling the obvious ("Your creatures are falling in battle!"), and sound effects of clanking and screaming taking front and center, as well as left and right of stage... it can all get too much, too quickly.
Anyway, the threat was defeated and the day was mine. Payday.
Further Fun Times
Your imps don't have a mind of their own - they'll obey orders - but there are certain things that do not get skipped, and we're not talking about breakfast.
You're told early on that you need to set aside a room for treasure. This is the room where all your gold will be stored, and you need gold to pay for more imps, for one thing, ensuring that more miners can mine the gold to get you more miners... You know how it is.
What you soon realise is that, come payday, imps don't give a shit about you and will run off to the treasure room to get their pay before coming back to work, proving that in amongst this dark and hectic game are some real nuggets of humour.
The training room makes sense. An improved imp is better than a regular imp. Anything is better than a regular imp. But a disgusting looking creature knowing that he needs to train every now and then in order to remain a valued member of the defensive force of the dungeon generates some laughs. Especially if they're so focused on training that they ignore the invaders currently smashing the heart of the dungeon to pieces.
Further Frustrations
After picking up two spiders from the training room and plopping them vaguely near the heart, hoping they'd solve the problem I was facing, I switched over to the 'spawn some imps' button and slapped them down into the combat as fast as my dwindling gold reserves would allow.
Again, whatever planning I had was reduced to nothing but dumping a meat-shield in front of the objective and hoping for the best, and doing that a second time didn't fill me with hope for the rest of the game.
Final Word
It feels like I'm more and more conflicted with games these days. There's a lot to like about Dungeon Keeper, but I can get into it because of all the little things I don't like, or can't get to grips with.
Granted, I've not sat down with it for an extended period to iron out the kinks, but I've seen what I wanted to see in order to get an idea of the game. Setting up defences for an attack you know is going to happen can be a great puzzle to think about - but I've not unlocked traps and defences for my dungeon, assuming they exist.
Zoning areas for rest and training and treasure appeal to my inner city builder, but if the hero literally just smashes through the wall into my treasure room and strolls through the short corridor that leads to the heart of the dungeon, those plans crumble.
It's great to look at but hard to see. It's an entertaining but sometimes overwhelming listen. It's a strategy simulator where the strategy can and perhaps will go out of the window when it matters. Dungeon Keeper is a lot of things, but I can't say for sure if Dungeon Keeper is a game I'll go back to in a hurry.
With a little more research, yeah, perhaps. Who wants to only be the good guys, right?
Fun Facts
Dungeon Keeper was conceived while stuck in a traffic jam, and such was the detail of its conception that developer and driver-not-driving-because-of-a-traffic-jam Peter Molyneux failed to notice that the traffic jam had cleared some time ago. So he says.
Dungeon Keeper, developed by Bullfrog Productions, first released in 1997.
Version played: MS-DOS/PC, 1997, via emulation.