Dungeon Keeper 2

The Good
Excellent graphics, animations, sound, acting. Gameplay is fun for awhile, but gets repetitive. The ability to "possess" any of your creatures and run around in their bodies FPS-style is by far the best aspect of the game.

The Bad
Doesn't seem true at all to the original premise, which was for DK to be sort of an anti-D&D game. It was supposed to be dungeon-crawling from the point of view of the dungeon, but it comes off more like C&C, or any other your-army-against-mine RTS game. For me, it's totally lacking in the kind of atmosphere usually associated with Tolkienesque dungeon-crawling. Instead, you've got the devil (in the main character, Horny) and various lesser manifestations of evil inhabiting a hell-like world of fire and brimstone--almost a "builder" version of Diablo. It just doesn't jibe with my expectations of what the game should be.

The Bottom Line
A cross between Diablo and C&C. If you've always wanted to pit an army of nether-dwellers against an army of goody-goodies (though the actual differences between them are less than dramatic in practice), here's your chance.

The Good
I liked many things about the game, but I LOVED the ability to take control of one of your units and view the world you created through the first person perspective. This feature should be implemented into many many more RTS games in my opinion. I also liked the humor in this game and the over all fun I had playing the campaigns. For the first time ever, I wanted to beat the campaigns, regardless of how hard they were. The reason for this is because each time you beat a level in the campaign, a very comical video becomes available to you(there is a video for each level).There are also several patches that add to the game's flavor on the DKII web-page.

The Bad
Like many RTS games, micromanagement can sometimes be a pain. Although there is considerably less micromanagement in DKII than in other games in its genre, it's still enough to make you frustrated at times.

The Bottom Line
I strongly recommend this game. This game is usually available for around 10-20$ and it is worth the money. This game is probably one of the most beautiful RTS's I have played.

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.