Dungeon Keeper Mobile Isn't A Game | Feature Creep By Tarmack
69I'm just sickened by the open unfettered greed in the iOS video game market. Yes, I know that it's the standard and everyone is bad. Well, that's not entirely true. Some microtransactions make sense. Some iOS games have gameplay mechanics designed to be fun rather than just gameplay that by it's very nature pushes people towards in-app purchases. The new Dungeon Keeper by EA is one of the worst offenders to date and I'd love to say I'm surprised, but well that would be lying. I loaded it up on my LG G2 so I could see just how bad it is, and it's awful.
Dungeon Keeper is a video game series with a great history. The original Dungeon Keeper was developed by Bullfrog and released in 1997 with it's sequel in 1999. The basic premise of the game is that you're a the evil being in charge of a dungeon, controlling your imps to mine paths, setting traps for adventurers and spawning armies of underground bad guys to do your bidding. It was one of the few games that let you be the bad guy and made it feel so very very good.
So the new Dungeon Keeper mobile is a free to play game, but that's a lie. It's free to download but in order to get any gameplay it costs money. It's fair to say at this point that a vast majority of free to play games are certainly not free, because you hardly get to the game part before getting your wallet out. There are good ways to handle free to play. Games like DOTA and League do this very well. You get a great game for free, which you can customize to your hearts content with real money. Nobody is harmed by that and the game design doesn't suffer. Why doesn't the design of League suffer because of microtransactions? Because the game still has to be fun and you can't pay for it to be fun.
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