New Dungeon Keeper-y game?

[Chardok]

Must...resist....buying immediately.....looks...too.......awesome...

http://store.steampowered.com/app/57650/

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Bought it. Installing it. Will inform fellow forum-goers of greatness.

[Korto]

Yessss... Dungeon Keeper.... Join us, come with us, join us... (Fine. Die then!); and then DK II, possessing a goblin and sidling in behind a mistress while she's training to gaze lustfully at her arse... Hey, we all did that, right guys? Guys?

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Ok, gave it a whirl:

The dynamic is quite a bit different from DK. It takes a few pages out of Evil Genius's book, and the concept is certainly similar to DK, but now there is very little room and "floorplan" design, and very little creature management as well. In their place are a bunch of RPG elements, specifically a bunch of talent trees you level up your dungeon lord with. It gives the game a distinct DotA/League of Legends feel, which is a little weird.

In place of mining (or Evil Genius's cool stealing mechanism), most of your resources now revolve around heroes. You plop down a few different doo-dads which affect heroes' needs, sort of like EG's stat bars. These needs in turn charge their "soul energy", which you then harvest by killing and imprisoning the heroes. In order to level up your dungeon, you have to harvest a bunch of this soul energy to plop down more doo-dads, which nicely decorate your dungeon.

It's kind of a weird system, and I wouldn't say it's bad per se, but it's certainly a pretty big departure from DK and EG.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Yessss... Dungeon Keeper.... Join us, come with us, join us... (Fine. Die then!); and then DK II, possessing a goblin and sidling in behind a mistress while she's training to gaze lustfully at her arse... Hey, we all did that, right guys? Guys?

Sure. We were like, thirteen at the time.

[Dartzap]

Ah, excellent. I was hoping a new DK type game would appear at some point. I shall go and give it a whirl as well.

[ShadowDragon8685]

Okay, bought it, downloaded it.


Oh. My. God. The micro! The micro!

On the very first actual level, I was starting to feel overwhelmed. See, think of this game as an extremely hostile SimResort-type thing. To get gold and soul-energy (two vital resources,) you need to let heroes into your dugeon, let them find what they're looking for (gold) and start to bugger off. Once they've started to bugger off, you have to kill them.

Now, the problem with this is that there's no way to automate it. Sure, you CAN set up a bunch of monster pentagrams right in front of the hero portal and they'll kill the heroes, but you won't get much (nearly 0) soul energy out of it. And the hero entry time is variable - highly variable. On the tune 30 seconds to 70 seconds. Whereas dead monsters tend to come back at about a one-minute interval, more or less, so it's possible to wind up with three heroes, one nearly dead, one half-dead, and one fully fresh, finishing off your last minion in the blockade, necessitating you hoof your dungeon lord down there yourself.

And it does not stop. You can't wall off the hero portal to make them look around at an empty wall and get bored. You can't shut the hero portal once you've opened it.

Then they like to throw extra shit at you - in the first level, not only was I fending off constant attacks from the hero portal, but also persistent attacks of rogue monsters from a down stairwell. And then the damn game wanted me to go and open a second hero portal. Fortunately for me, being the turtle I am, I'd already collected the next objective, so I was able to finish the level rapidly after I opened it, before any even entered.

But seriously. Oh my god, the micromanagement. It gets to the point you'll be frantic just for a few seconds to designate space to be dug out. This game is definitely a spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper 2, but good luck playing it unless you're on speed.

[Dartzap]

Skeletons are your friends, at least this early in the game. Small horde of them are capable of dealing with most things, and dont die when someone farts nearby