An evil Necromancer has escaped from his icy prison and is wreaking havoc upon the surrounding lands. Journey to a bleak, frozen wasteland and put an end to the terror!
Be prepared to fight your way through over 25 dungeons - each with 8 floors within! Explore icy caverns, three ominous towers a...
Windows 7 or later, 1.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 3D graphics card compatible with DirectX 7, Version 7.0, 2...
Description
An evil Necromancer has escaped from his icy prison and is wreaking havoc upon the surrounding lands. Journey to a bleak, frozen wasteland and put an end to the terror!
Be prepared to fight your way through over 25 dungeons - each with 8 floors within! Explore icy caverns, three ominous towers and a fantastic final dungeon!
Along the way, you will battle over 30 different monsters - including a variety of Tanar'ri, Mephits and Golems.
Avoid treacherous traps; solve mind boggling puzzles. The ability to jump and fly adds a new dimension to your quest - but be careful not to fall!
The 3D environment means you can look up, down and all around. Everything you view is in natural perspective - including the beasties that want you dead.
You have 3 characters to choose from: a male fighter dwarf, a male half-elf fighter mage, or a female elf mage, each of which give a unique flair to the game. Watch the mood of the game intensify as the cinematics change according to the active character. This is the nostalgia dungeon delving at its best - fast, furious, and fun.
DeathKeep will keep you in suspense and terrified for hours!
Originally released on the 3D0 as the sequel to Slayer, Deathkeep is the end of an era. The original release on the 3D0 was graphically on the impressive side especially with the scale of the dungeons in it along with a pretty strong soundtrack. For an honestly terrible system like the 3D0 it was a fairly decent dungeon crawler with some control problems. It lacked the custom dungeons of Slayer but the soundtrack was significantly better than its predecessor.
But we're not talking about the 3D0 version are we?
7 months later Deathkeep was ported to DOS and we encountered the usual problems associated with converting a CD based game to the significantly weaker DOS. Worse graphics, awkward keyboard bindings and even worse controls than the 3D0 version. If you're collecting the D&D backlog on PC then you'll no doubt pick it up but be warned that it's no Eye of the Beholder or Dungeon Hack. It's better than a Capstone game with Witchhaven but that's not a high bar to clear.
Deathkeep is downright terrible on PC. The mouse is locked to use weapon (left mb), use magic (right mb) AND movement (literally moving the mouse in any direction). This makes playing the game with a mouse impossible as you jerk around like you have Tourette Syndrome.
As for graphics, it was badly outdated when it came out (1996), it's an eyesore now for sure.
Buy Witchaven instead, it's so much better in every way!
I'm dead serious, if you have problems with motion sickness, it is like a sensory overload. I could only play like 8 minutes before everything went wrong.
So I started out in the game reconfiguring the controls to modern FPS controls, and from the start it looked promising. then I moved my mouse and all hell broke loose. THEY TIED MOVEMENT TO THE MOUSE! I completly forgot that was a thing in the 90's cause nothing was standardized for FPS, It was a chaotic wasteland of "yeah that'll work" I mean I should have realized that when the contols were designated to up down left right buttons.
So when using the WASD and mouse movement together, the game becomes Dungeons and Dragons on ICE, AND MAY ALL THE GODS IN THE REALM HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SENSES! Cause I had a stomach virus before I wrote this review and that was much more appealing.
HOWEVER, there are elements that were so interesting I really wish I could play it and not get sick. So I guess get your legally aquired 3DO port of the game and try to get it working on there.
Sorry but I like my stomach contents to stay where they are.
DeathKeep has serious flaws, but, in my opinion, it is not as bad as some reviews suggest, as long as you don't mind playing games from the 90's and the end of the 80's in general. It is also usually deemed worse than the 3DO original, however some improvements make it, I think, better in several aspects.
DeathKeep's ancestry could be described as Dungeon Master (party-based 3D dungeon crawler with real-time combat, 4 directions movement) -> Eye of the Beholder (its clone by SSI) -> Dungeon Hack (a single-hero, randomly generated dungeons) -> Slayer (smooth 360° movement, illusion of different floor levels) -> DeathKeep (actual 3D multi-level dungeons, however, not randomly generated), and the game has retained some of the aspects that made those games fun.
The first thing you encounter, though, is the bad aspects: 1) controls, 2) platforming, 3) the first dungeon designed as if to showcase them. Controlling movement with mouse is awful, better not to try it. However, using exclusively keyboard controls seemed OK to me, I could easily adapt to it, mostly tapping the keys to move or turn in bursts.
The dungeons being 3D, some platforming is introduced in the game. Though not completely bad, it is somewhat awkward. Especially when you have to execute a series of jumps at precise moments (when platforms are rising or falling), you can get frustrated backtracking after each failure (at least falls do not hurt in DeathKeep). However, in this PC version of the game you can save at any point, so if you dislike the platforming aspect, you can alleviate it with saving and restoring until you succeed. Platforming was the only part of the game where I did use also mouse, since it allows a fine turn by small angle, while often it is hard to get the exact desired angle by tapping the keys.
The first level has slippery ice (with you bouncing off the walls like a billiard ball after enemy hits you) and platforming (optional, though, leading to some goodies), plus you are weak yet -- one of the worst first levels in gaming history. One can deal with it though doing it by portions: killing some enemies, returning to the rest area to regain health, venturing to kill some more, etc. Plus saving and restoring if nothing else helps. There is no slippery ice in any of the subsequent levels, plus gradually you get quite strong.
Combat seems to be easier than in 3DO version, due to the weapon cooldown period being considerably shorter. Boss fights are not much fun, being mostly too easy.
The fun part to me besides combat with the enemies was "solving" the level, i.e. finding the way to the exit which typically wasn't quite trivial (but not too hard either), plus -- except for the first levels when I concentrated on survival -- the completionist's approach of finding all enemies and all secrets with goodies. Several of the levels employ the 3D-potential of building intricate mazes. Here the PC version is, in my opinion, considerably better than the 3DO original: it has compass and automap. Youtube has 3DO playthroughs where the players get lost in a maze for an hour or two, while PC version's automap and compass essentially takes away the frustration from finding a way in a maze.
The game has quite good music, a variety of monsters (mostly 2-3 new monsters per level), interesting and quite variated level design, it is quite generous with loot (e.g. you usually don't have to rely on the limited spell amount, you can instead use all the orbs and wands lying around when magic is needed), including unique items (usually found within secrets) such as Flame Tongue +3, Bow of Neverending Arrows, Ring of Regeneration, Ring of Sustenance, Boots of Flying, etc. The secret doors usually (though not in all levels) are noticeable due to slightly different texture than the normal walls.
If you wish to find all enemies, you may need to fly (e.g. with Boots of Flying) on some levels, due to them being hidden on seemingly otherwise inaccessible ledges.
Overall, I had quite some fun from this game, despite the flaws.
Objective Review
6 of 5 must play.
5 of 5 great story great gameplay.
4 of 5 great story average gameplay.
3 of 5 average story great gameplay.
2 of 5 play only if it's your favorite genre.
1 of 5 play if you have nothing better to do.
0 of 5 play if you're a masochist
-1 of 5 avoid
DeathKeep score is -1 of 5.
Subjective Review
I would really enjoy this game with better controls. I got pretty far but eventually gave in to the horrible game mechanics. The mystery/exploration/fighting fun parts of the game slowly vanished with each painful step until I finally said, "No more..."
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