Developer: Bullfrog Productions
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Rrp: £4.25 (Origin) and £4.79 (Gog.com)
Released: 26th June 1997
Available on: Origin and Gog.com
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Approximate game length: 18 Hours
Have you ever wanted to run your own dungeon? Just get some minions and make a go of it? Well if the answers yes this might be the game for you. Besides, being evil is so much fun, anyone who says otherwise is either lying or the most boring person in existence.
There aren’t that many games out there that truly encourage you to play the villain. At best you usually get to be a good guy that ignores the rules. Dungeon Keeper isn’t one of those. As the name suggests you play as the ruler of a dungeon, actually more like the ruler of what will become an evil empire. But everyone has to start somewhere and for you its with dungeons.
As I’m sure you’ve seen from the release date that this game is pretty old, twenty two years old in fact. Because of this I’m just going to assume that most of the people reading this either never played it or have only heard of the godawful mobile version that EA squirted out in 2013, which means I have to cover the basics.
Dungeon Keeper Gold is a strategic dungeon management simulator. The aim of the game is grow your dungeon to attract more creatures, train those creatures and in turn use them to defeat the lord of the realm (or rival Dungeon Keeper).
When you start the game you usually only have one room that you control, the Dungeon Heart. Keep that safe, if it gets destroyed you instantly lose. You’ll have to create rooms by digging out the walls surrounding the Dungeon Heart. That’s where imps come in, you start each level with a four and they will do all the grunt work. They dig, reinforce walls, claim rooms, mine and pick up gold and even fight (really badly).
Once your imps have done their job (which can be sped up with a motivation slap, but not too many as they will eventually die from it) you can start allocating which rooms will do what.
As your dungeon grows it will attract creatures to fight for you and you’ll need to attend to their basic needs; food, shelter, a torture room, that kind of thing.
Some creatures will only appear once certain rooms have been constructed, for example Warlocks will only arrive once you have a library built (along with the other basic needs that all creatures need). The more powerful the creature is the more needs it will have. However there is one thing that all creatures, except the imps, will need… gold. That’s right all of your creatures are on the clock.
Periodically you’ll get invaded by heroes, or sometimes the creatures of other Dungeon Keepers. Your creatures will automatically attack them, but you can help them along by picking them up and dropping them directly into the melee. It can be a damn sight faster than waiting for them to actually arrive at the battle.
The games camera is set in such a way as to give the player a isometric view of your dungeon, this can mean that things like walls etc can get in the way but that is fixed by the ability to rotate the camera using the [delete] and [page down] buttons.
It also has to be mentioned that unsurprisingly this game is quite dated, on modern screens it can seem quite muddy. There are a few mods out there than can help make it look a bit better but I haven’t implemented them in my screenshots and gameplay.
Dungeon Keeper Gold includes the official expansion pack ‘Deeper Dungeons’ which improves the AI of your enemies as well as includes fifteen extra single player levels (also some multiplayer ones).
There are a lot of little things that make this game difficult to play these days, yes the resolution is one of them but that’s not the main issue. For me I had issues with the user interface, it was just a bit clunky involving a few too many button clicks for what could have been streamlined. Admittedly there are keyboard shortcuts but when you have to hold down a three button combination then you’ve gone too far.
How does the game hold up then? Well graphically it truly doesn’t, hell I even tried the mods and while its a minor improvement the game still doesn’t look good. But on the whole, if you can look past that, its still just as fun to play as it ever was.
EDIT: If the screenshots and video look a little strange its because my usual
program for taking them doesn’t work with games that run through Dosbox (which a lot of older games on gog.com do). However Dosbox does come with its own ability to take screenshots and capture footage so I’ve had to use that.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
War for the Overworld
Overlord
The Dungeons series
