By creating a game that started an entire genre you have to expect some critical viewers to examine your game. Dungeon Keeper is a game that truly stands the test of time, although it is not without its faults.
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First released in 1997, Dungeon Keeper was the game that spawned the dungeon management genre. Don’t believe that’s real? You simply have to look at games such as Overlord and Evil Genius, both of which came after. It was therefore the father and what an introduction to a genre it was!
You play as an evil overlord and your goal throughout the title is to purge the land of all that is happy and good. To do so you must command you vast armies of minions to go and fight the bad good guys, and by specifying what you want dug up by your Imp minions, you obtain more space in your dungeon. With more space come rooms which will attract other kinds of minions such as the crafty Troll, the bookworm-like Warlocks and even undead skeletons.
As you build up your rooms and your legion of evil, you will be training them in order to gain experience in combat; but they are greedy creatures and will expect to be paid on their pay day. This game is as much about room building as it is about resource management. Creatures can get angry if you do not pay them or if they can’t get to a lair, which brings me nicely to my first problem.
A known bug in Dungeon Keeper is that sometimes if you place a door (an item you can craft in the Workshop room quite early on in the game), the minions suddenly can’t figure out how to navigate to a lair! I’m not sure what causes that, but it’s a little irksome. There are also what I call ‘loops of stupidity’ that some of the creatures face, where they will encounter an enemy then decide to flee a few steps then go back in to fight, only to flee again. This can go on for ages until your creature dies or until you deal with the situation yourself and is especially true of Imps.
These doors are too confusing for me, no lair for me!
So there we have it: sometimes your minions aren’t the most intelligent of creatures, who’d have thought it? These are both very minor bugs but they are present and I notice these things!
Admittedly the graphics are a bit of an odd point for me. See Bullfrog, the developers of this game, are very well known for having produced some of the greatest titles of this era, many critically acclaimed. Theme Hospital for example is one that I grew up with and admire even to this day. The graphics on that are clean and is just superbly well stylised.
Dungeon Keeper however, since I first played it, is visually pleasing but always feels like the resolution is too low for me. I’m not just basing it on how it looks now; I’m even basing it on the correct resolution for the game.
Your dungeon heart. Protect from the impending heroes at all costs!
Dungeon Keeper has some incredible little sprites, especially for its time. However, due to how grainy and pixelated it looks, it isn’t always the nicest looking of games. We could chalk that up to it being about being in an underworld but in all honesty I do feel it could look a bit better.
It also doesn’t help that they attempted a way to possess minions and on a modern resolution, it shows that these models just haven’t aged very well at all. With this being said however, a bonus point on graphics as they successfully implemented 3D isometric views and they did it well. The fact they had the possess feature allowed you to see all of the work that went into the graphics, as grainy as it is from that close.
The music is nice; it’s really quite minimal and mostly is just ambiance rather than actual music. It fits the theme of the game very nicely and you always feel like you are planning an evil scheme to take over the overworld.
There is a painful point for me here in that I do detest picking up Warlocks in this game. You have to drop them eventually… and the noise they make is simply annoying. I know a lot of people praise this sound, but I for one do not. But who am I kidding? If a disembodied hand decided to pick me up and drop me around, I guess I might make a scream like that too. Urgh, that sound will forever live in my memories of this game. With this being said, some of the creatures make fantastic noises and it is satisfying to slap creatures which makes a solid sound. Nice and evil!
Dungeon Keeper is a diamond in the rough. At the time, it was incredibly innovative with very few releases like it. The closest to it at the time would possibly be Populous but even that is quite dissimilar in many ways. Not surprising then that Populous was another title by the legendary British developer Bullfrog.
Dungeon Keeper was one of the most innovative games of its time.
With a few bugs and not the most pleasant first person mode, it’s true that Dungeon Keeper wasn’t a perfectly polished game. However, it doesn’t stop this being one of the most innovative and down right fun titles of its time and indeed today.
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