Dungeon Keeper Gold™

Somehow the sequel never interested me much, even when it came out to all-around praise and despite the fact that DK1 is one of my all-time favourites. Now, I have played DK2 and while gameplay is very similar between them, DK1 just feels better to play and also benefits from being more free-form. As well as having stronger art direction, and I can't help thinking DK2 should've been more adventurous with its tilesets as it immediately lost identity there. This first Dungeon Keeper has that magic in it, the thing that cannot be replicated, which is obviously gonna be a problem for any sequel. DK2 is good, just.. you know, this right here, is IT.

The game has a fantastic atmosphere. You really do feel like an evil dungeon keeper, in total control of a horde of evil (But lovably hilarious) monsters. The Dungeon Keeper campaign plays nicely and sets you up with mini objectives which are somewhat guided by the map layout and available buildings, traps, and monsters. It can become a bit of a slog on the later levels however and you will find yourself frustrated by your monsters' (imps in particular) stupid behaviour that you have no way to control. This ramps up massively for the Deeper Dungeons and these levels are a real grind. Still worth playing if only because it's never really been replicated since.

It started out rough. It's an older game, so the pixelation was tough to the point of not even being able to make sense of it at first. I trusted some reviews I'd read so I pushed on. Eventually I started to see the meaning in the graphics, started to see the patterns of the game, and got into it. A cool strategy building game about building a dungeon just right so your auto played minions do their thing the way you hope they will. Place your rooms correctly, attract the powerful monsters, drop them near enemies and hope they fight and then hope they win. Just as I'm getting going, level 10 comes along and the enemy is just brutal. I'll still be mining enough gold to build my basic rooms and the enemy will march across the map with an army twice the size and 3 times the experience of mine. The difficulty curve from the last level to this one is like, absurd. I had started playing the previous levels maybe two or three times to get them right, but this level I've played maybe 20 times and I am no closer to winning it. Either poor game design or from some help pages I've seen, some kind of update to the game AI made this level just stupid. Either way, it's kind of sad that I'm about to give up on this game after a couple of days because it's NOT FUN ANYMORE.

One of my favourite childhood games, I've got nearly 72 hours into it on gog and it's how I discovered the site in the first place. It runs very smoothly, sounds and looks great, what more do you want

This game is a great dungeon building/evil overlord simulator....the only problem is that this is the DOS version which is the worst version - the better one is the windows 95 version which sadly is not this one This version is low-res, highly pixelated that run in a 320x240 - and yes I know that you can improve texture quality by pressing Alt+R but it will only change the in-game to Hi-res and will leave the main menu, overworld map and the cutscences still to be in low-res... So my advice if you already own the game - install keeperFX mod....Still it would have been nice if the 95 ver would be made compatible with newer systems and would be released in addition to the DOS one