Random Retro Review: Dungeon Keeper 2

[IamLEAM1983]

So Dungeon Keeper Mobile was... something. It most definitely was a thing; largely a thing that was not loved by many. Not that EA gives a shit, it has the doctored Google Play ratings to fall back on, as well as the droves of FarmVille and Clash of Clans fans to suck dry. The game's creative director has been interviewed before, saying that as far as his metrics suggest, the fans are happy.

The fans, happy?! Oh, no, no, no, mister Skalski. The happy ones are the kiddies who don't know any better, the Cow Clicker addicts who think gaming now can be reduced to this – clicking on a small corner of your screen and waiting twenty-four hours to do it again. Give it a couple lifetimes or a completely thoughtless injection of dosh, and you've got yourself a decent dungeon! Yay!

You know what? Let's cleanse our palate of EA's modern dung heap and go back – back to further I think I've ever been in a Random Retro Review. Let me get my DeLorean and rev up the Flux Capacitor to 1.21 Gigawatts; because we're heading back to 1999!

Ah, 1999. My last year in high school, the release year of The Matrix, and the last few months I can safely say I spent huddled up in a dank basement with an old cathode-ray TV, an SNES and a smattering of cartridges. I discovered Tales from the Crypt in that year, played Half-Life for the first time, finished Duke Nukem 3D without cheats – it's a year that has a lot of significance to me. It's also the year that saw Bullfrog Productions' last independent title before they'd be swallowed by EA. Peter Molyneux would go on to form Lionhead, which would ironically end up joining Microsoft's cabal. As for Bullfrog, they'd have been notable for several years already, with titles like Theme Hospital, Theme Park, Populous and, of course, the original Dungeon Keeper.

A bit like that dreaded mobile re-imagining, the first two games center around, well, yourself. This time, however, you're not playing the Stalwart Hero of the Land or some sort of Lone Wanderer archetype. You're basically Sauron, a faceless and all-powerful blight seeking to lay waste across the land. You exist and thrive underground, with your only means of assaulting the goodly peoples of the surface world being the outright assault of their own subterranean fortresses. You can't do that without an army, however – no matter how all-powerful and deliciously evil you're purported to be. In this, Dungeon Keeper reveals itself to be about 90% management and only 10% strategy, as your goal as an Army Recruiter of Doom is to create an outpost of Hades that's as inviting as possible. As ungrateful as it sounds, your omnipotence must be used in order to please your minions and satisfy their basic needs. It's all very cheeky, slightly morbid, and constantly tongue-in-cheek. As the series' tagline goes, it's good to be bad...

The second game caught my eye back in the day thanks to its then fairly advanced graphics. By today's standards, DK2 looks like it has a severe case of N64-itis, of course. Models are low-poly, textures are blurry – but this isn't exactly Skyrim, either. It's an old game made according to ancient standards. If you keep that in mind, the art style and the overall direction of the package gels into a good representation of that “Affably Evil” approach.

Every level starts out with the representation of your evil power, the Dungeon Heart. You have to protect this pulsating abomination with every single worthless life you'll attract, and can only directly issue orders to your Imps, small creatures born directly out of your Mana reserves. Imps never tire and have no needs to speak of. You'll primarily use them to dig rooms out of the surrounding soft dirt, and to pry chunks of gold free from the bowels of the earth. Everything you build or order costs money, so you'll need to keep a lookout on your funds and any potential gold seams you could exploit.

Initially, the requirements are braindead-easy. To attract battle-ready creatures, you need to provide accomodations for them. Start with the two bare-bones necessities : food and shelter. Carve out a little room, tag it as a Lair, carve out another and tag it as a Hatchery. Once that's done, sniff out the closest Portal and free it from the surrounding dirt. As soon as your Imps claim it in your evil magnificience's name, new denizens should start to pour in. At first, you'll only attract weak and unimposing Goblins. You'll need more room templates if you want more unit diversity. Map by map and chapter by chapter, the game introduces new rooms for you to plot out and, for each of them, new units. The Library is going to attract as many Warlocks as you've got lecterns, with one lectern requiring four spaces. The Training Room is going to help you to buff your units up to Level 4, but you'll need a Combat Pit to progress further without throwing your men in the line of fire. Plot out a Treasury to increase your gold storage capacity, and you'll attract the fleet-footed and skeezy Rogue, who acts as a terriffic scout but has no qualms about stealing from the hand that feeds it. Plop down some Guard Room tiles and you might call forth the Dark Elf, the game's all-female and pure sniping proponent.

The more the game goes on, the more complex the room requirements become. Some aren't even all that obvious, with the game rewarding independent experimentation. Let's assume you're breached by a few Dwarves and a goodly Knight, and your minions manage to steamroll them. You can leave them to rot where they fell and wait for them to die – which produces Skeletons that will fight in your name – or you can lock them up in a Prison for the same effect. Feed them chickens from your Hatchery, however, and they'll grow in health and proficiency. From there, the choice is yours : sadism runs twofold in most Dungeon builds, with the Combat Pit being a great way to doom those goody-two-shoes to a gladiatorial demise. You can also leave them in the care of your Dominatrices, sultry women who like it very, very rough... So much so, in fact, that their idle form of entertainment consists of torturing one another!

Prisoners you do manage to break retain their race-specific traits but have a chance of choosing to fight for the cause of Evil, which never fails to make me smile...

If you have a Graveyard, however, then these Skeletons lose their appeal. Provided you have the hollowed-out and designated space, you can toss all your dead, allied or hostile, in there. Each corpse you plop inside the Graveyard's confines has a small chance of rising forth as a Vampire – a Max Schreck-worthy baddie who packs the Warlock's research proficiencies with the capabilities of a decent brawler like the Troll.

Certain room combinations are in the occult variety – obtainable only through a bit of online sleuthing. Dig out a 6X6 plot, tag all but its four corners as Library tiles, and then designate the remaining four as Hatcheries. You'll conjure the Archmage forth, who researches your Hand of Evil's available spells at a blistering pace that's a solid ten times superior to the norm.

In the meantime, units like the Troll are used to upgrade your dungeon with traps and doors. Build them a Workshop and you'll be able to try and funnel your enemies down a path of assured self-destruction, provided you've riddled the snakelike corridor they're stuck in implements of death. Other rooms, like the Casino, serve no immediate concern, but are there to deride those few units that are seriously hard to please. Like the Sims of later years, all of your dungeon's dwellers have wants and needs. Food and shelter are two of these, but so is entertainment. The Dominatrices have their own torture chambers to play in, of course, but it doesn't exclude them from occasionally wandering into your gambling hole – which you can shamelessly rig to win back most of your payday's lost gold.

After all, you wouldn't be much of an evil overlord if you didn't screw your minions over, wouldn't you? Do it too much or abuse their patience or needs, and they'll all leave you. You can afford to be wholly evil towards the enemy, but Hades has to extend some amount of care towards its native denizens, right? Making things more difficult is the fact that certain unit types have increased needs. The obese Bile Demons make wonderful smiths and work nicely with Trolls in the Workshop, but they have the most fragile Hunger stat of all the units. Going from being sated to being beset with terrible hunger pangs in barely ten minutes, these big palookas require a constant outpour of chickens. Your Hatchery will be taxed, that's obvious. Some amount of prior planning is sure to lessen the blow.

Ultimately, outside of specific mission-mandated requirements, you're free to play the game as you see fit. Will you gun for the nigh-invincible Dark Angels or would you rather stockpile your Mana until you can call the Horned Reaper – aka Horny – forward? One is powerful, if extremely limited, while the other is a PC-controlled Berserker who has as much chance of whaling on your own forces as those of the enemy.

Of course, if the pursuit of destroying a stereotypical and barely-described Fantasy Land surface world still feels too much like an RTS to you, the game includes the “My Pet Dungeon” mode, which allows you to Sandbox the shit out of the game's systems and concepts. You can play Manager and totally ignore the now player-controlled enemy-spawning system, or create the best available trap layout and give it a test ride underneath the unwitting iron-clad shoes of the knights and kings of the land. You can also do a bit of both, working on your perfect little community of the Damned and the Wretched – only to, er, forget to stick doors into place. Set the enemy AI to Unrelenting and watch as a continuous torrent of righteous bumpkins steps forward in the hopes of challenging your dark dominion.

There's a few LAN-based and TCP/IP multiplayer modes available, but all they really do is add the element of pressure to your dungeoneering. Expand too fast and you might breach the enemy walls with an unprepared set of units. Work too slowly or play it too safe, and you'll end up with a little Hellish utopia that can't defend itself to save its life. Or unlife. Or Other Variable Metaphysical State. Whatever.

By far, however, Dungeon Keeper 2 is worth a spin thanks to its oodles of character. All of your units, as hideous or twisted as they may be, all pack personality and humour. Build a Casino and set it to be generous in its payouts, and you might be suddenly treated to an impromptu block party celebrating your newest jackpot, Silly String and confetti flying in the air as someone, somewhere, decides to put on The Tramps' Disco Inferno. All of your creatures start dancing for a few minutes, until the music randomly and abruptly stops. Your trusty advisor, the disembodied Mentor (played by the excellent Richard Ridings), packs the kind of sultry, smoky voice that feels just south of Tim Curry territory. The simplest tooltips become little monologues that overflow with evil relish and regal contempt for the enemy. For a more modern comparison, imagine what The Sims would be like if all of the tooltips were voiced by Wes Anderson's Lucien Lachance or Mister Burke characters... For an added bonus, try playing at six in the morning. Try Christmas or the New Year. Try midnight or, why not, day-long binges. The Mentor has a few quotes for each situation, with some dates and hours actually having an effect on gameplay.

As the Mentor says, all your curses (your spells, essentially) are at half-price for the exact minute of the Witching Hour. Play past three in the morning and he'll tells you you need to finish up; the Imps need to lock the place down. Or, you know, the Mentor might just yawn at you, wondering if Evil ever sleeps...

What it really boils down to is that Dungeon Keeper 2 is the benchmark by which all similar games are to be judged. It's not the deepest or most demanding of strategy games, but it's not trying to be. At the same time, so much care and attention was put into this quirky universe's design that it's hard not to fall in love with your despicable and oh-so-disposable denizens. There's a few games in the throng of pretenders to DK2's title that are worthy of their own review, but plenty more that aren't. For every innovative, yet needlessly complex system Evil Genius throws at you, there's games like Dungeons and Impire that just completely and entirely miss their intended mark. One tries to behave more like Theme Park as seen through Sauron's eyes, the other's mechanics are broken. Then there's oddballs like the Free-to-Play dungeoneering simulator Ubisoft has worked on, dubbed The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot. It feels like a close cousin to Bullfrog's legacy on paper, and then the money-grubbing elements unravel...

It a way, it's a bit sad that one of the best formulas of the nineties has been drowned away in desperate attempts to reproduce Supercell's success with Clash of Clans. It's insulting that EA would think so little of a franchise people have been holding near and dear to their hearts, to the point of thinking it's only worth a Korea-only MMO and an internationally available cow clicker. This betrays the fact that for a lot of the upper management in big beasts like Triple-A producers, gamers aren't people with passions and love affairs with specific series, so much as numbers and statistics to fit on an Excel spreadsheet. When the only way to earn a livelihood in the industry is to nickel-and-dime your customers in the hopes of being able to fund the next multi-million faceless console juggernaut, something's gone severely wrong.

All the same, it's not that bad. For every bloated publisher like EA, there's curators like the Good Old Games arm of CDProjekt. Thanks to them, it's still possible to run Dungeon Keeper 2 on 2014's hardware, and to relive the simple charm of days where innocence made everything feel simpler. Games were just that to my late-teens self. Games, and not cynical investments undertaken by faceless corporations in the hopes of being able to multiply them. It certainly does feel like there was a time where games could afford to have their own personality without necessarily trying to drag in each and every demographic.

For 6.99$, it's possible to relive those days. Compare that to the hundreds EA is expecting you to shell with the series' mobile iteration. You'll realize that the money-to-passion ratio is severely skewed.

Give it a shot. If you're like me and you have an inner Leonard or Rendell that takes a fiendish amount of pleasure out of doing things for the evulz, you won't regret it.

After all, it feels good to be bad...