"Too stylish for serious criticism..."

Dungeon Keeper is the most stylish game I've ever played, and I would love to be able to give it 10/10 or even 9/10. It's one of those games where you ask yourself, "Didn't anyone ever playtest this?". If only they had ironed out the issues, big and small, with gameplay and graphics then DK would still be talked about as one of the most entertaining and purely fun games ever produced. As it is it will remain one of my favourites until the end of time, simply because of the fact that it drips with the style of a cacodemon in an Armani suit.

In very obvious contrast to all those sickening games where you are forced to play the good guys, DK hands you your own dungeon (complete with imps, gold and pulsing heart) and asks you to terrify and corrupt the lands directly above your minions' heads. This is done by provoking the invasion of the terranean heroes (an impressive assortment comprising knights, ninjas, fairies, wizards, giants, barbarians...) determined to erase the blight of your existence once and for all, then villainously smear them all over the floors of your dank, shadow-filled dungeons.

To assist you in this endeavour are hordes of fascinatingly diverse monstrosities, each one glad of the opportunity to kick some hero butt (just so long as you pay them, feed them and house them in the environment they find most pleasing). Build the right rooms in the right places and you can end up with a dungeon teeming with bile demons, dragons, hellhounds, trolls, orcs, tentacles, dark mistresses - the list goes on and on. Furthermore, the heroes themselves can be converted to your cause by the simple means of pitiless torture, which makes it a good thing that torture chambers are often available to build from your list of rooms.

But it's not only heroes who have designs on getting rid of you and your festering hordes. Many of the dungeons are already occupied by other dungeon keepers, not one of whom is pleased that you're trying to encroach on his personal demonic space. Each of them also has a dungeon and armies of loyal horrors, and you'll have to use all your dungeon keeping wits and tricks to break through to his dungeon heart and smash it to the deck - only thenm can you claim the land as rightfully yours.

So, how does a modern overlord of terror keep his enemies at bay? Well, the more monsters he has the better, for a start. There are many different types of room to be built, all with the aim of keeping your minions happy. Your worker ant imps are the ones who have to do most of the work, mining out new areas in which you can build, collecting gold and gems to keep your treasuries full, claiming the all-important portals through which your monsters will arrive, if properly attracted. Once the monsters start coming they will variously want to train their combat skills in training rooms, study new magic in the libraries, construct new traps and doors (more on these later) in the workshop, or even scavenge for enemy creatures in the scavenging room. If they get bored they can always nip down to the temple for a spot of demonic worship, or kick back in the torture chamber and spectate while your torturers perform lobotomies on the hapless heroes.

But it's not only your monsters who can help you get one over on those enemy keepers or lords of the land. The workshop allows you to build doors of varying strengths, which can block access for any undesirables; or your trolls could also invent new and horrific traps which you can place in any dark corner of your dungeons, lying hidden in order to give an incoming hero an extremely nasty surprise. Nothing makes an invading dwarf move faster than seeing a giant boulder rumbling down a corridor towards him (unless you count lightning bolts up the arse).

Eliminate the lord of the land, or delete a dungeon keeping foe trying to lay claim to the same area, and you win the mission. The previously beautiful and happy land above is then transformed into a smouldering hulk of despair and horror, and all is well in your dungeon keeping world. This is the basis of Dungeon Keeper.

If all of that sounds like great fun (and it is) then you may already be rushing down to the budget bin of your local EB store now. But wait, cos I ain't finished.

Dungeon Keeper does have its problems. First, the graphics. This is one of those old games playable in either DOS or Win95, which gives you some idea of what to expect. Don't get me wrong, the dungeons are fascinatingly designed. Each room looks distinctive and every corner is filled with dynamic shadows. The monsters are all suitably disgusting and evil, and exploring an intricate dungeon through the eyes of a minion can leave yoru skin crawling. Just don't zoom in on anything. It's a pretty and eye-catching game, but high-end it's not.

Gameplay is another issue. Though most of the game involves slow and careful construction of working dungeons, there's also a lot of waiting around. To get to the high levels you want your creatures to be at, you will have to sit and wait for them to train and train and train and train. You can slap them to speed them up or cast Speed spells on them, but this makes little difference. Research is another one. Each level adds a new spell, but doesn't retain the ones you researched in the previous levels. So you have to research the same things over and over, which again takes a lot of time. And that's assuming you have the appropriate creatures in your dungeon to begin with. High level creatures research quicker, but to get them to high level... yup, training.

Battles are worth mentioning here too. There is no battle strategy here (well, very little). Many levels involve a final face-off with either a big bunch of heroes or an enemy keeper's goons, and both scenarios require you to pick up a lot of your strongest creatures and simply drop them near your enemies. And hope you win. These are just big brawls, and what wins them is numbers and creature strength, not tactics or strategies. You can weaken your enemies first by baiting them into traps or casting offensive spells, but this is secondary to the main melees. And so you end up with very long periods of waiting in virtually every level, followed by short and frantic battles which are visually represented by a big mess of monsters casting spells, swinging claws, farting poison gas... Thinkers need not apply.

There are other things but I've typed a lot here, so I'll try to tie this review up. One last problem I have to mention is bugs, and I don't mean special types of monsters. There are very few bugs in this wonderful little game, but the ones there are make huge differences. I've owned the game for years and there are certain levels which still don't function the way they should. There's one where my enemy can't attract any monsters to his dungeon, so all I have to do is get some of my own and then attack - I always win. There are other similar bugs which leave levels standing scratching their heads, wondering what the hell the point was. I haven't yet found a patch which fixes these weird levels, which is a shame because the game does lose a lot of flow when these ones crop up.

Anyway, if you can ignore the gameplay issues and if you don't mind dated, best-not-look-too-closely graphics, Dungeon Keeper should definitely make it into your game collection. I can 100% guarantee you will enjoy, and even love, many parts of it, and if you take one thing from it it will surely be that DK has too much style to let itself be spoiled by one or two minor problems.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 08/03/07