Dungeon Keeper - Bullfrog

             Reviewed on a P120 by James Judge

At last. Over the past couple of years this has to be rated as one
of my most eagerly anticipated games.  Finally, after delay upon
delay the finished product is here, but the question is - is the
game any good after all of these months in production?  The idea
seems sound enough. Instead of playing the good guys, restoring
the peace of the land and destroying the lair of the nearby
semi-omnipotent evil dude(TM) you take control of the evil
dude(TM) and create a dungeon with which to thwart wandering
heroes and other evil dude(TM)s. If anyone can remember I wrote an
article about giving the bad guys a chance about a year ago, so
now I've got the perfect chance to see how right I was in that
assertion.  The game is played over twenty levels, which
compromises what appears to be a floating island of goodness,
which is viewable from your castle tower.  Each new level heralds
new creatures, new opposition and a more involved game.

In Win '95 the installation was a breeze - chuck the disk in the
drive and off you go. Unfortunately that's all I could get to go
with a breeze. Playing the game for any more than five minutes was
impossible as the game continued to crash, never stating the same
reason twice. Luckily the MS-DOS version of the game is exactly
the same (excluding the crashes, that is) and installed (and
played) without a hitch.  To play the game you'll need at least a
486-DX4 (for DOS, a P75 is recommended for Win '95), 8megs of RAM
(16megs for hi-res graphics), a four-speed CD-ROM and DOS 6.22 as
well as 65megs of HDD space (for either version). In Win '95 the
game will probably also try to overwrite your DirectX files too
and, if you've an AWE32 or 64 then it has some new drivers for
that too.

Upon loading of the game you're treated to a pretty good intro
sequence with a neat guitar track in the background. Guitars are
cool, huh huh! You're then given a trite phrase (usually along the
lines of "He who enters your dungeon dies") and, without further
ado, you're into the main menu.

Selecting a new game and then the land which you want to
"redecorate" into a more chaotic image leads you straight into the
heart of the game. The majority of the play is viewed from a
rotatable isometric viewpoint, much like Syndicate Wars (but with
the scaling done much better), in either low resolution or hi-res.
To switch between the two you need to press <ALT> and <R> together
and after a few moments the new resolution hits your screen. In
low res everything looks a bit scrappy and, to be honest, the game
runs much too quickly. In hi-res, though, it's a completely
different picture (forgive the pun). The game runs at what I term
to be the 'correct' speed and the dungeon looks positively
sumptuous with all of the monsters having pixel perfect graphics
and distinct animations, casting up to four shadows from the
dynamic light sourcing and even the dungeon itself looks really
good.

Anyway, onto the game. The manual itself is a bit poor and even a
full reading won't impart the basics of playing the game properly.
Luckily the first three levels are something of an interactive
tuitorial with messages popping up at the bottom of the screen
telling you what to do and why to do it.  A basic game involves
you building up your dungeon by telling your worker imps to mine
areas from the rock in which your Dungeon Heart is located. Once
the required space is tunnelled out you can then select certain
floor types to occupy the space - whether that is treasure rooms
for your gold, lairs for your monsters to kick back and catch some
Zs, torture chambers or temples.

Each different type of floor space (or room) attracts different
creatures, and with a good mixture of rooms of a certain size
you'll soon be attracting monsters to your dungeon. That's right,
you don't just make the monsters, you have to make your dungeon
the most desirable, by having enough cash and living space to
entice the monsters into your dungeon (as well as any special
rooms that a monster may require - for example, the Warlock only
arrives after you've built a library that is larger than nine
squares in size). Once you've got the creature into your dungeon
you then have to worry about feeding it and paying it at regular
intervals.  You'll also need to provide them with training,
otherwise they'll always be weaklings and you must put their
inherent talents to use, otherwise you won't progress very far
(for example, the Bile Demon is a great fighter once you've
trained him up, but when he's not training he can be making items
such as doors and traps in your workshop).

The more monsters you attract the larger your dungeon will have to
be and the more you expand the more attention you attract. Soon
local heroes will come a-knocking and a-tunnelling, trying to
steal your gold and vanquish their local evil dude(TM) (ie you!)
to earn a free ale down the local tavern. When they do make an
appearance you'll need to marshal your forces and kill the swines
with your minions, as well as any traps you've built and spells
you've researched.  The level ends when you've either killed
enough local heroes to alert the local good dude(TM), otherwise
known as the Lord Of The Land, and killed the aforementioned slice
of niceness, or in some dungeons you may find yourself up against
other Dungeon Keepers who are in direct contest with you for
control of the lands above.  If this is the case you must find
their Dungeon Heart and destroy it mercilessly.

Control of the game can be entirely mouse based, but I use the
keyboard to scroll around the map and for quick short cuts to
important rooms. With this point and click interface everything is
easily manageable, even though the game proceeds in real-time, and
if you feel at home with games such as Red Alert then this game
should prove to be no hassle, what-so-ever.

There are a few irksome points about the AI of your creatures,
though. As you don't have direct control of your creatures (you
can only influence them) you may drop a creature a corner away
from where a battle is and the stupid blighter will just walk back
to its lair, instead of joining the fracas. Also, once a creature
(mainly the worker Imp) has completed its designated task it'll
wander away and do something of its own devising. However, once
you get used to the interface and know what the creatures are
liable to do redeploying them becomes extremely easy, and you
don't have to know where a creature is to find him (you can select
him from a tally table whenever you want).


The most innovative part of the interface is your Hand Of Evil.
Basically, this is your pointer, but when it goes over a creature
it turns into a gnarled green claw with which you can interact
directly with the creature. You can pick the creature up (and up
to seven associates in one go) and then deposit it quickly where
it's needed, but you can also reprimand it by giving it a good old
slap across the chops. It damages them, but makes them work
harder. Cool!

In all Dungeon Keeper has the makings of a really good game, and
the attention to detail sets it apart from many other games (as is
the same with most Bullfrog games). For example, if you slap a
chicken (the food you grow in your dungeon for your minions) it'll
explode in a shower of feather and blood. You can take control of
any creature directly and control them in a Quake-esque manner,
performing all of their tasks in a well presented 1st person
interface. If you take control of a chicken in this manner,
however, you'll have no control what-so-ever!


I have a few reservations about the game, though, and these are
what stop me from whole-heartedly recommending it to you. To start
with the longevity of the game is in question. So far I've only
spent a few hours tinkering away at the game and I'm already on
the eleventh level (out of twenty) and I know that the physical
size of future dungeons don't vary greatly from what I've been
playing with. So, at this rate Dungeon Keeper truly will be a
five-minute wonder, which is a shame as I feel a lot more levels
would have made the game more varied and infinitely better to
play.  The second reservation is, in fact, just a disappointment.
When I was reading all the pre-release hype of this game over the
past year or so, I was imagining a game that was more along the
lines of Theme Dungeon where you took control of one dungeon for a
significant amount of time.  Instead you are continually
rebuilding your dungeon and, from what I've seen so far, the
actual design of the dungeons don't effect gameplay all that much.
Personally I would have preferred a game that let you really look
after one dungeon for a really long time, allowing you to
incorporate cunning design instead of just ad-hoc building.

Finally we've got the repetition factor. The aim of the game is
the same for every level, and there is no deviation from the
simple, build a dungeon, stock it and kill the enemy formula.
Admittedly the learning curve is so that you're still being given
plenty of new spells, rooms and monsters when you're on level
eleven and twelve, but having just an extra creature to
differentiate one level from another makes for a rather limited
play, and doesn't encourage you to play a level over again.

So, given all of that, is the game any good? Well, given the fact
that it has been so long in development and my expectations of it
were so high, I can only say that I was disappointed. I loved the
first few levels, but now the novelty has worn off and I've lost
the just-one-more-go factor. The mission structure isn't varied
enough and the same tactic that I employed for the third dungeon
is working just as well for the eleventh, as well as all of the
intervening levels. This means I've come across no difficulties in
completing a level and can't even remember losing significant
numbers of creatures over these eleven levels.

Having said that it s something different and is presented very
well with enough there to keep you going for a couple of weeks
playing a level a night, or something like that.

If you're looking for something light that is a break from the
norm then this game will fill that empty void in your life.
However, if you expected a full-on dungeon management game (like I
did) instead of a Red Alert/Theme Park cross-breed that is light
on the strategy side of things, you're going to be disappointed.

One final thing - there is a multi-player option, but I haven't
tried it out and I imagine that this would provide a saving grace
for the game, but then again, maybe not!

Right, I'm off to give my Dark Mistress a good old slapping...

@~There is now also a mission disk, Deeper Dungeons, with 15 more
@~levels, now graphics and improved AI ... Sue

                              - o -