Game not as bad as everyone says

[Draetor24]

So I got the Gold package during the $5 sale, because I've been playing the Tropico series from Kalypso, and figured I might enjoy this series.

Overall, I don't believe this series anywhere as good as the Tropico series (which I really liked), but it's decent enough to play through the campaign. Definitely worth the $5.

I can see this game getting repetitive and boring, but to play through the campaign, I think is worth the money. I'm only playing the original Dungeons so far and will play the sequel next. I doubt I'll play multiplayer, as I have way too many Steam games from sales I want to try.

[MadVandal]

Agreed...so far I'm a third of the way through the campgain and so far am getting more hours of play per dollar than many others games. The game falls in the average to above average range.

Overall the game engine seems to work and has been stable, only annoyance is the stupid registration logon and Alienware ad. Voiceovers are sometimes kinda slow but you can just read the dialogs and just click 'em to skip the audio.

Playwise if you try to use a Dungeon Keeper style strategy and approach then the game won't work you. In Dungeons you generally lay things out for heroes in this order:

entrace -> gold pile -> armory/library -> traps/monster den.

Spacing between the needs and the monsters is key. You don't want heroes to chase monsters until after the check out the "needs rooms".

The pressure comes from trying dealing with the hero level up timer vs how many incoming heroes you can handle and havest to prevent your monster level and overlord power (prestige) from falling too far behind.

Unlike DK, in which every hero is an immediate threat, heroes in Dungeons are mainly opportunities to get soul points which are like a currency...provided you keep their power in check. People have complained about babysitting heroes but you really don't have to if you're dungeon heart is defended. You can ignore the heroes most of the time if you're busy. Sometimes you'll have a few heroes get missed leaving satisfied, it happens.

What keeps Dungeons from elevating to a great game is a few flawed mechanics. One the whole prestige thing which drives you overall power which it can be annoying having to place these objects all over which take up space, and then later going back and deleting them for a refund to get larger prestige objects (more expensive prestive items yield a higher prestige value per soul cost).

Second is the way it campaign can railroad you with timed objectives and partially pre-build dungeons. You don't always get the time to really enjoy building out the dungeon before you're pushed the next region. Fortunately the pause button lets you move, click, and view the dungeon contents while the action is paused.

[DrakenLord]

Agreed I bought and finished the first campaign. To be fair the low ratings were probably because of bugs and stability issues which might have largely been patched by now. The only problems i saw in the first game is until the last 2-3 missions where maps were so bigs and so much was going on that the game crashed many times. Especially when trying to save.

Right now i am half way through the second game. Overall my impression on dark lord are :

- Story is inferior. Kind of a ripoff of lord of the ring... Parodies are funny in moderation but here they basically copy / pasted everything.

- Dungeon keepers are generally pushovers compared to the original, until you get a strong economy going and can afford to upgrade them. I miss upgrading my keeper from map to map (now all skills and attributes reset every map, and sometimes many times in the same map). And I miss all the hero spells and skill trees. Some abilities were overpowered but the variety was fun. Now you get like 10 spells tops, 3 of which as unique to the dungeon keeper you are using... Definitely a step backwards.

- I hate controlling more than 1 dungeon keeper at the same time.

- Pacing of the missions themselves is a bit off, with widely varying difficulty... I really notice these issues because i play on maximum difficulty level. For one example, if you get a huge blob of heroes and there is a healer or two in the bunch it can become very hard to deal with. If you don't kill the healer first, you won't be able to kill anyone, and if you go kill the healer the swarm of heroes will mow you down in seconds. Still manageable with careful base / monster / traps planning, but you have to know what you are doing.

- The good, they improved on the interface and made some things clearer. For example you get a warning when a hero is full and plans to leave the dungeon, etc.

So all in all i would say the first game is GOOD. The second one is meh, average even of they clearly made a commendable effort, i wish they had an original story and balanced levels like the first. But overall i am glad they did this series differently from dungeon keeper... i like the original aspects, and it leaves room for a dungeon keeper 2 one day.

I am hoping they made enough money to make a dungeons 3. Some mistakes were made but i can clearly see this is a good team and the series has a big potential if they keep refining it.