Dungeon Keeper 2

The Good
Dungeon Keeper 2 is all about being the bad guy-- instead of being a hero on a quest to kill the evil Hoozabugub, be the evil Hoozabugub and torture, slay, and corrupt those pesky heroes that keep invading your domain!

The game begins with controlling your Imps, little magical fiends, to build and dig tunnels. When you find magical portals, troops will start arriving, like Goblins and Warlocks. Build them places to sleep, train, practice their magic, etc, and they'll get happier; more and more powerful minions will come to do your bidding, and your domain grows...

This game is brimming with humor and style. Every creature has a unique resting palce it makes for itself-- it's hilarious seeing the Mistresses lock themselves up in an Iron Maiden for the first time. (That's not all, those girls will torture themselves and each other when they have nothing else to do). You can torture hapless heroes, control an army of Bile Demons, and lead attacks on heroic citadels. When you build a casino and one of your creatures wins the jackpot, everyone in the casino will start dancing along to a tune that comes out of nowhere-- each creature has a unique dance animation. Any game that makes goblins disco gets points from me! On top of it all, you can slap your minions when they misbehave, and the results are just hilarious. You never run out of slap points either-- you're the boss here!

An interesting feature is taking possession of your troops. When you do this, you can control them from a first person perspective. This feels like a first person action game in itself (albiet a sub-par one, as the graphics were designed for viewing from a distance). Other fun spells add interesting touches to the game, all with funny results.

The Bad
While the game had loads of potential, it really didn't utilize it all the way. The campagins feel rather bland and the mutliplayer map selection is incredibly limited. This, unfortunatly, stifles the replay value and quite sadly stops it from becoming a classic in my book.

The AI is also incredibly, nightmarishly hard. While this may be viewed as a good thing, I have yet to win a single deathmatch against the computer (the default campaigns are mostly scripted, you're not fighting other dungeon keepers, so this dosen't come into play). Ouch!

The Bottom Line
Dungeon Keeper II, while falling short of being a classic, is still a wonderful game that'll keep you playing for a good few weeks. Keep it on your hard drive, and return to it every now and then for a fun play and a good laugh.

The Good
I haven't played the original, so I can't make a comparison, but I can say that I am not, as a rule, a fan of RTS games. This one made me forget that. Every once in a while a game comes along that addicts me, usurping all my attention for several days or weeks. This is one such game.

The graphics, the sounds, the music, the cut-scenes - all deserve high praise.

I love the theme, though I was a little disappointed to be so often fighting fellow evil "Keepers" instead of good guys from above. I understood the game was to be about play evil vs. good, but more often it was evil vs. evil.

The campaign was great, with each mission growing progressively harder. Some levels took me several attempts to beat, building on what I had learned the previous time, and bringing me back more eager than ever each time anew. The campaign doesn't overwhelm you, though, since each new level introduces a new monster, room-type, trap, etc. Your knowledge base grows as you play.

The first-person aspect was well handled, I must admit, and sometimes quite important to victory. But contrary to all the other praise, it was my least favourite aspect of the game, and something I avoided as often as possible. I hated the inability to command the rest of my troops, monitor my torture victims and cast spells when I was in 1st person mode.

The Bad
I already mentioned the evil vs. evil aspect in the above section.

While the My Pet Dungeon concept really appealed to me, you have to build your own challenges in (I made up a random table using dice to determine when heroes would appear). Also, in the My Pet Dungeon mode, if you torture and convert an enemy, that enemy type is no longer available to come rampaging through your dungeon. Somebody messed up an "if-then" clause in the C code there.

I hated that mana was limited to 200,000. With the size of my dungeons, my mana was usually at that level, and it became almost pointless capturing enemy mana vaults or converting their tiles to yours (though I guess it does limit their mana).

The campaign was huge, but I wish it was even huger.

The Bottom Line
A wonderful and unique concept very well executed.

The Good
There is simply nothing out there like this game. Well, that's not true -- Black & White and Startopia come close -- but DK and DK2 were first. It's a RTS, it's Sim Dungeon, and more! And the evil narrator who advises you as the game goes on is wonderful, dryly funny when you're doing well to downright threatening when your game is going poorly...

The Bad
It's got a sharp learning curve, and demands careful perusal of the manual. Even then, you can have fun in the "My Pet Dungeon" mode, that lets you tunnel around and learn as you do.

The Bottom Line
The game is basically a real-time-strategy game, viewed isometrically, with some interesting twists thrown in by the ability of you, the Dungeon Keeper, to add traps to the tunnels you dig. You must recruit creatures through Portals you capture, and mine gold to pay them, and build rooms to house, feed, and entertain them while you get them to achieve your nefarious goals.