"What we have here is the shell of Bullfrog's pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans."īut there I go, reviewing the free-to-play business model rather than Dungeon Keeper. Meanwhile the amount of gems mined from each square can be counted on your fingers, while every gem transaction costs in the hundreds. Making space for a basic 3x3 space suddenly becomes a task that can literally take all week.
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Fill that space, however, and you must start mining the outer edge of the map, made up of gem veins that take between four hours and a full day to excavate a single square. You're started with an area of soft ground to dig your first rooms out of, and the imps carve through it with familiar ease. The game does ease you in, at least, adhering to the classic dealer's mantra that the first taste is free. Those mottled tiles to the side are gem veins which can take up to 24 hours to dig out. Scroll through the rooms and traps yet to be unlocked, and you'll see the price of items heading north of seven figures. The ripple effect of upgrades needed so that your dungeon can even hold that much rock is ludicrous. Getting it to Level 4, the cost rockets to 50,000. To give an example of how crudely this system has been implemented, upgrading your Dungeon Heart - the core of your lair - to Level 3 requires only a few thousand rocks. The head bone, in this case, is connected to the wallet. You need to level up your workshop, but to do that you need more rock than you can store, but upgrading your rock storage means saving up more gold than you can store, but upgrading that.
By constantly ratcheting up the amounts required, the game creates an ingenious but ruthless domino effect. Progress is impossible without upgrading your various rooms, and to do that you need gold or rock, your stockpiles of which have a finite ceiling that must be raised by upgrades. Of course, of course, the economy is stacked in such a way that you're forever being steered towards the gems. Everything you do has an immediate cost counted in one of the first three currencies, and a countdown timer that can be swept away with the fourth. There are four currencies at play here, three of which are in-game - gold, rock and mana - and the inevitable gems which can be purchased with real money.
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The big difference is that wherever there's a crack in the gameplay, EA has hammered in a wedge in the shape of a paywall. Our old horny host cheekily makes fun of micro-payments even as he's ramming them down your throat. The viewpoint is loftier, the art style more cartoony, but almost every feature from the 1997 game remains in place.
It was a near-perfect feedback loop of routine and invention.Īnd, credit where it's due, EA's Mythic studio has revived that gameplay style very accurately. The more stuff you discovered, the more new things you could build. The more you expanded your labyrinth, the more stuff you discovered. You did this by using an expanding army of imps to dig out new rooms, which you could then use to house traps, treasure and monster-spawning hatcheries. It was one of the first "tower defence" games, for example, flipping gaming convention upside down by casting the player as an evil tyrant, crafting the most perfectly evil lair in which to trap and kill do-gooder enemies who enter your hallways looking to save the world. Revisit the original Dungeon Keeper today and be amazed at just how many of its ideas have been reborn in mobile games. It is, at least, easy to see why EA revived this beloved cult classic in this fashion.
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That's because any critique of this remake of Bullfrog's 1997 PC hit can't help but slide down the slippery slope towards being a critique of free-to-play gaming in general, and that's when people start banging the table and raising their voices and it all goes a bit Jeremy Kyle. Ouch.ĭungeon Keeper is a hard game to review. Bullfrog's strategy classic is reborn as a free-to-play Clash of Clans clone.
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