Dungeon Keeper Gold™

Dungeon Keeper is a classic game in the unfortunately very thin base building genre. The basic idea is that you build and maintain dungeon, attract monsters to do your bidding and duke it out with the Lord of the Land and any other keeper, all with a good helping of dark humour. If you have played games such as Evil Genius and Startopia, meet their granddaddy. To help you do your bidding you have the imps. Puny, defenseless and beady-eyed, they are your little helpers in running the dungeon. They require neither food, pay nor sleep and they are the only of your creatures who can dig tunnels to expand your dungeon, mine gold and - most importantly - deliver gold to your treasury, as well as sundry upkeep. If they are not up to snuff you can right-click them to give them a slap with your Hand of Evil to give them the proper motivation, at the cost of some of their health. As the only thing an imp can do in battle is to die, you'll need to attract more combat-oriented creatures to your dungeon. Not only do they expect to be paid, but they also require the dungeon to be up to their standard - the bulbous bile demons won't join you unless you have a large hatchery to support their feeding pleasures, and the kinky dark mistresses won't be attracted unless you have a torture chamber to fulfill their... other pleasures. Once you actually have creatures in the dungeon the work is not over. They need to spend time in the training room (costing money) to acquire new abilities and be useful in combat, when they level up they expect to be paid more (do they think you are made of gold?) and all through this you need to keep them happy by making sure that their needs are satisfied - worst come to worst you can drop a sack on gold on them to make them happy. Additionally certain creatures do not get along with each other. A spider will try to pull the wings of every fly it comes across, if you convert a heroes wizard through judicious use of torture expect him and your warlock to have "words", and the ultimate death machine, the Horned Reaper, does not get along with anyone will have to be kept separately. But honestly, why are you still reading this review at this point? Just buy the game already! It's the good Bad choice.

The game is great, this release not so much. the sound is too choppy to play. i regret spending the 6 or 7 bucks it costed cuz it's never going to get played its so bad.

Finally found this site after trying to force my old Dungeon Keeper to work on my laptop, and I'll admit I was wary of at first, but I went for it; no regrets at all. It is just as I remembered it, and yes, the resolution starts off low, but just press alt + r in game and it dramatically improves. Seriously, if you're a Dungeon Keeper fan, buy this, it's cheap and it's brilliant.

Some of the games from my childhood don't age well as I return to them now. Dungeon Keeper is an absolute exception. Sure the graphics are never as good as you remember them but the sound design and aesthetics are absolutely masterful. There was nothing quite like this in strategy gaming when I was a kid, and still not a lot comes close these days. Though there are some modern takes on this lmiited genre of Dungeon Management, none have ever made me as happy as this original classic. The game isn't overly deep, or even all that difficult, but I admit to struggling on some of the later missions when I was a kid. Coming back so many years later and replaying this as an adult has been an absolute treat. With my mind matured and geared towards strategy I was able to crush the games main campaign and immediately started over because I wanted to keep playing. The game isn't overly deep or complex and your immediate control over your minions is very limited. But the gameplay loop of designing your dungeon layout, training your minions, setting down some traps and then executing the final battle while your creatures shriek, scream, cast spells and beat down the troublesome forces of good and your rival keepers is masterful. The chaos of these battles is fun to behold, even through the pixels and aged graphical quality. For a few bucks you have a highly addictive game that you'll return to time and again. Just beware the sequel isnt quite as good.

Still my favorite real-time strategy game. This game is grid-based filled with mostly but not only dirt, and you cave in your rooms and ways. You'll have to manage the gold you find and place facilities in the rooms you made. What I thought is cool back then is that you can switch into first-person-perspective into any entity of yours and control them. But otherwise they will actually do everything automatically, you can but don't have to assign anyone to anything. And unlike many other games, you're playing the role of the "evil" one here, training demons, building dungeons, killing knights and slapping your minions so they work harder.