Dungeon Keeper Gold™

I loved this game! I used to spend hours playing it. It's a shame the expansion; "The Deeper Dungeons"; isn't available too.

I love Dungeon Keeper 2 to no end, but this game hasn't aged well at all. In fact they're pretty much the same game but Dungeon Keeper 1 has worse graphics and looks very dark. So now for the review.... what is it? You play a dungeon keeper that uses imps to carry out your bidding, have them dig, mine, find things and build rooms to keep your creatures happy. What are these creatures? When your imps find 'gates' creatures will come through. These creatures vary from scout flies, dark elf archers, wizards, dark knights and so on. Each has a purpose.. Now why do you need them? To conquer heroes and defeat their leader / leaders. The opposition has its goodly counterparts to your evil minions. The rooms you build will keep your creatures fed, paid, sleeping, researching, and trap building. Its a really fun game. Well Dungeon Keeper 2 is.

Could I just buy it and install it, could I just play it on Windows 7 without doing any tweaking?

PROS: You can design your own dungeon. You get to be the bad-guy. (And really, who doesn't love that?) The quirky monsters. That sarcastic narrator. Finding seams of Gems (Hello infinite Gold!) Turning your opponent's monsters into chickens.....then watching as your minions eat them. Having a Reaper named 'Horny'. CONS: There's no way to 'insta-build' like in DKII. You keep getting reminders of things that you already know (your Treasury is too small, you need a bigger Lair, etc), even while you're in the process of making the corrections. And really, that's all I can think of that I found annoying about this game. And, if you know what you're doing, you can even rewrite one of the text files to give yourself an edge (spells, rooms and traps cost nothing, Gold seams give you more money, training costs 0 Gold, etc), much like the cheat codes for DKII, so you can just sit back and enjoy the game to its fullest without worrying about running out of money. There's nothing quite like defeating your opponent by overwhelming him with an endless mob of Level 1 Imps. Would I recommend this game? Absolutely. It's perfect for both hard-core gamers (the RTS part of it) and casual gamers alike, so I'd recommend adding this game- and its sequel- to your game library. You won't regret it.

Dungeo Keeper 1 might be one of the titles that forged the strategy genre for what it is these days but unfortunately the old one hasn't aged very well. Actually not well at all. I'm not going to review the game as a whole since I know nothing about it (couldn't force myself to actually play it after launching) but this serves more as a warning that unless you're a serious nerd for games-of-yore you should probably skip this one. There's obviously a "high resolution" switch by pressing alt+R in-game but that didn't really change the fact that the game is pretty much unreachable for a newcomer.