Dungeon Keeper Gold confidently hits its marks as a quality Action/RPG title.
89
Verdict
93%
Steam
—
IGDB
Verdict score based on confidence-adjusted Steam reviews?
Very Positive on Steam (93% positive from 1K reviews)
Engaging multiplayer/co-op experience
Limited professional critic coverage
Includes Dungeon Keeper and the Deeper Dungeons expansion. Being the Dungeon Keeper and all, this is your home, too. And it’s your business to take these loathsome creatures of darkness and hone them into screaming, frothing, clawing forces of destruction. You lure them in with food and the promise of dank and fetid places to sleep. You keep them in line with the back of your hand and the threat of dire consequences. You pit their scaly hides against the best that the Forces of Good can muster, and they die for you as they rip steaming entrails out of the hapless heroes.
Runs well on modern hardware.
Last updated 18d ago
My review time is nice, so is the game. I'll vote bad so people that read see the patch note! Since this is 1995 code, the lack of accessibility + bugs are hard to ignore. The game runs properly but FPS does not after 50-100 creatures exist in a map. => THERE IS A FREE UPDATED PATCH VERSION CALLED DUNGEON KEEPER FX so lets go and play that instead!!! Now as for this actual game review: + It is the progenitor and inspiration behind innumerable (mini) games and so much more. Stuff like Starcrafts Mineralz and every Ant Colony sim out there. + The devs were really experimental and had fun, it's an FPS, RPG, RTS, TD, automation, godgame, ...^^ + This includes the artwork and finer details in some monster and even wall designs if one looks closer. + Some concepts here were ahead of its time and are lost to history, in example rewarding map exploration with the ability to transfer your favourite unit to the next mission. This personalizes story missions, adds replay value and also lets the PLAYER influence the difficulty drastically continuesly. +++ Main thing making this game so fun and addicting is making individual base designs + where your personal elite squats level up AND go about their daily business + while designing trap-based killing floors + exploring the mysteries dark + scavenging, looting, producing and hoarding your riches! - The music is not it. There are 2 "rock" pieces blasting on repeat with alarm sirens, now try to stay sane. - The bonus and later levels have very punishing and unfun difficulty spikes and surprise instant deaths. - There are countless bugs in this and the UI is outdated. Unit control and pathing is meh. How to actually influence what units show ups, how many and what they and structures do is quite erratic. - This is a story-game in the sense that replaying will not add anything if explored fully the first time. ... and AI multiplayer was not a really a thing, neither will pvp work for this kind of game balance^^ P.S. Might add another line here after going through the deeper dungeons and more importantly the FX game version. Excited for both.^^
Holy Moly. Before you get ahead of yourself and dive in as a result of the glowing (and likely nostalgia-soaked) reviews, HEED YE HERE, KEEPER: This game is Old. *Real* old. I'm talking that quirky, Japanese-inspired PS1 era old. The kind that scrolls *way* too fast when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, the map-scrolling speed is jarringly slow, the top-down FoV is WAY too tight, the options menus are *obtuse*, and some things just don't make sense. Indeed, while you posess a creature, looking with the mouse is INVERTED. Like a *Flight Simulator*. That's how early into 3D graphics we are here, people. Music is deliciously synth-industrial-grunge. The world very clearly took a page out of Diablo 1's success the year prior and went full tilt into that dark tone. And when I say dark, I mean it makes Dungeon Keeper 2 look like a straight satire or comedy. This game revels in the gore and gunk from the very first intro video. And did I say dark? I meant DARK. As you scroll across the dungeon, you really do need to hover your mouse over to see... well, almost anything. My goodness the speed of this game is... a bit much. It's like the arcade days still lingered in the developers minds as they made it for the PC market. Indeed, a high score table exists after you finish a mission, but there is stark online connectivity here. Where does it get uploaded to? Why is it there? Remnants of an archaic gaming past, to be sure. Monsters move, dig, attack - hell, they do EVERYTHING fast. Really fast. Combined with your insane scroll speed and everything begins to feel a bit woozy... And what's with all these creatures? Why is there a beetle? The fly isn't the only insect, apparently. Oh, and a skeleton without buidling a prison? Okay... And... uh... what's a Demon Spawn? DK1 throws Dungeons & Dragons goodies at you like a cocain-fueled autisic fantasy nerd that just got out of university. It revels in it. It dives head-first, and doesn't submerge until you're covered in its smelly, gunky goo as well. Mission design is simpler than the sequel here, and equates to heroes just spawning in and charging for your treasure or dungeon heart. Even so, there is a delicious amount of charm here. DK1 crunches and stomps around in full confidence and timbre. Keeper beware - you may struggle with just how jagged some of these edges, but you may find yourself staring at your freshly cut hand and bleeding fingers, smiling... and squeezing harder. IT'S GOOD. BUT IT'S.... WERID.
in a year, this game will be 30 years old and nothing even comes close to beating it in this genre. the fact that they thought of so many different mechanics and actually managed to implement them is crazy. i got this game on a demo disc when i was 5 years old, which led to me buying it at åhlens. i've returned to play it so many times, but i've never actually beaten it. now i'm sitting here again. thanks to keeperfx, it runs perfectly on modern hardware and looks amazing. i can't recommend it enough. also it comes in swedish which makes i hilarious its good to be bad
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Data sourced from RAWG, Steam, IGDB, CheapShark, Wikipedia, HLTB, and GX Corner. Sources: rawg, steam, igdb, wikipedia.
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