Dungeon Keeper (DOS) - Let's Play 1001 Games - Episode 54 (Part 1)
15Time to put four years at evil monster architecture school to work
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I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, retrogaming fan, and determined optimist... Join me in this series while I try out EVERY game in the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE, before I die. The game review for each game will focus on the question of whether you MUST play this game before you die. But to be honest, the game reviews are just for fun, this series is more about the YouTube gamer journey. Let's try out those classic retro games we grew up with, have fond memories of, or heard of but never got a chance to try! And with that said, the game review for today is...
Dungeon Keeper
Released 1997
Developer(s) Bullfrog Productions
Platform(s) DOS, Windows 95
Genre(s) Real-Time Strategy, God Game, Management Simulation
Jay's Thoughts
Dungeon Keeper takes the traditional good guy/bad guy dynamic and throws it on its head. In Dungeon Keeper you take on the role of an evil dungeon overload and your goal is to create a dungeon to lure heroes to their death, at the hands of gruesome monsters. In a way it's SimCity for the bad guys. Or maybe you can think of it as Diablo, only you're Diablo. Either way, it's pretty great!
Dungeon Keeper is by the developers of Theme Park and Theme Hospital so it has a building mechanic a little more similar to those games than to SimCity per se. You spend the first part of every level ordering imps to carve out big cavernous spaces for you to establish as different dungeon rooms. Types of rooms include lairs and training chambers, treasure rooms and chicken roosts, evil libraries and evil research labs. After establishing your rooms you end up recruiting different monsters and then you wait for a hero to try to make his way into your dungeon and watch your monsters feed!
A tip I learned early on in the game is to make the only real entrance into your dungeon feed into the training room. That's the room where monsters will be spending most of their time anyway, and so when a hapless hero does stumble onto your dungeon they are usually greeted by a swarm of sweaty gym-going monsters, who are ready to utterly destroy him.
In later levels it won't be enough to just kill random heroes but you'll have to organize your monsters and launch expeditions at competing dungeons, which is pretty fun. Another neat element is you can "possess" different monsters in your dungeon and get a first person view of your creation, which is pretty neat indeed.
I did not get too far into this game but I can say that it really is a fun game. I love the concept behind it too. I think anyone who enjoys building games like SimCity could have some real fun with this one. Because hey, it's fun to be the bad guy... once in a while at least.
➙ Must You Play It?
Dungeon Keeper is a great game that sets the player to build an evil dungeon which is used to lure hapless heroes to their demise. It's a great strategy game with a great concept and a lot of fun. Try it out if you've never heard of it before!