Wertzone Classics: Dungeon Keeper 2

Your conquest of the underworld continues. Your next target is the Kingdom of Harmonia, but King Reginald has created a magical force to repel dungeon keepers. Dissipating this force requires forging an alliance with the redoubtable Horned Reaper and seizing the twenty Portal Gems from their guardians.

Dungeon Keeper II was released in 1999 and was one of the very last games released by Bullfrog, one of the greatest and most innovative video game developers of all time. It was a straightforward, iterative sequel to their 1997 hit Dungeon Keeper, retaining most of the core gameplay, adding new features and including a superior interface and better graphics.

As with the original game, you start with a group of imps, your dungeon heart (which has to be protected at all costs) and not a lot else. Early parts of each level are spent excavating new rooms and mining gold to afford stuff. By building different rooms and claiming portals you can attract and recruit new creatures, train them up and send them into battle, or put them to work on various tasks. Warlocks, for example are great at researching new spells and room types, but are also very powerful if trained up correctly. Since creatures only gain experience for combat training (or actual battles), not working, you have to carefully manage your creatures and what they are up to.

The improvements over Dungeon Keeper are legion. The graphics are vastly superior, using a full 3D engine which is vastly more detailed and attractive than the original game. The original game is fine (once you know how to activate the high-res mode) but Dungeon Keeper II is a giant leap ahead and retains a detail and charm that still impresses today. The graphic design is also more varied, with immense lava levels changing things up, and different types of underground environments and styles to make things more varied. The interface is also better, allowing you to drag-select areas to tunnel out (a vast improvement on the original) and giving you more feedback and precise control of individual room functions. On the downside, the combat feedback panel is less detailed and responsive than the original, making it harder to lend fine amounts of aid (such as healing) in battles.

There's also a little more busywork in the new rooms. Training rooms can now only train creatures up to Level 4. To train them higher, you need to put them into Fighting Pits. This is hilarious - especially as creatures scurry over to cheer on their favourite - but requires far too much micromanagement to be really viable for training up large numbers of creatures at once. Still, it is entertaining. Some of the other new rooms are also clever, like the Casino which allows you to fleece your wages back from your creatures on low-income levels.

There's more of a storyline linking different levels and some optional missions and side-quests. There's also some amusing animated sequences linking each level.

Dungeon Keeper II (*****) doesn't really put a foot wrong. It's a slightly easier game than Dungeon Keeper (and certainly a lot easier than the original game's insane expansion, Deeper Dungeons) but it's far from easy. It's fun, still feels fresh eighteen years after release and is a deeply compelling game that will keep you playing for hours. It's available now on PC from GoG.

Wertzone Classics: Dungeon Keeper

Brave heroes are called forth to invade the nightmarish underground world and challenge the foul beasts and their dark keepers who are threatening to overrun the world. However, you are one of those keepers. Starting from humble beginnings with only a few imps to command, you must build an underground dungeon full of the finest training rooms, magical libraries, lairs and food sources. You must recruit an army of monstrous foes and then unleash them on rival keepers and heroes alike. You have to conquer and desecrate the world. It's good to be bad.

Dungeon Keeper was originally released in 1997 as by the legendary Bullfrog Studios. Over the course of a decade they released some of the finest video games ever made: Populous, Powermonger, Theme Park, Syndicate, Magic Carpet and Theme Hospital. Of those games, Dungeon Keeper holds a strong claim to being the best.

For a twenty-year-old game, Dungeon Keeper is surprisingly fresh and accessible. Bullfrog were one of the first game studios to pour a lot of time and thought into user interfaces, how to make controls as instinctive as possible. Although Dungeon Keeper has some odd quirks (you can't zoom with the mouse wheel, for example) its interface is mostly instinctive and easy to use even today. Do remember to hit Alt-R on starting a game to switch to high-resolution mode, otherwise controlling it can be a pain.

You start each level with a few imps, who are the workhorses of your dungeon. You can get them to tunnel out new rooms (you can decide how big they are, with the limitations of geography), claim new territory, strengthen walls, mine gold and generally act as gophers. As you build rooms, this attracts the attention of passing creatures, who arrive and set up home. They need a lair to live in, a hatchery to feed on, a training room to level up for combat and so on. Some creatures - like flies and orcs - are generalists who are mostly good for combat. Others have speciality skils: trolls can be put to work in the workshop churning out traps and obstacles. Warlocks and dragons are magical creatures who can research new spells in the library. Dark mistresses are canny warriors, but have to be kept "entertained" in the torture chamber. Vampires and skeletons are useful, but cannot be recruited: you have to bury enemy bodies in the graveyard and wait for them to rise, or starve them to death in the prison first. The game's tone is dark, but also extremely humourous with some very amusing sound effects and animations.

The game is interesting for its non-direct controls. You can give orders to creatures (mainly by picking them up and dropping them in the room you want them to work in, or near the enemies you want them to fight) but whether they obey or not is based on how happy you've kept them in their dungeon home, if you've given them enough time to eat and rest as well as training or doing stuff. Unhappy creatures will leave the dungeon, but happy ones will stay and level up, becoming tougher and more powerful. Your opponents - either rival keepers with their own armies or invading heroes from the surface - are often quite powerful so maintaining a balance between training creatures up to toughen them and having them work to improve your dungeon infrastructure is critical. The relatively limited number of creatures and tactics means that there isn't too much tedious micromanagement, however, and Dungeon Keeper is a surprisingly fast game. The very longest, toughest levels won't take more than an hour at the most.

As the game progresses, it introduces new features. Traps such as gas mines and Indiana Jones-style runaway giant balls can be great force-equalisers on levels with relatively few creatures to recruit. Infinite gemstone mines, which can generate a steady (but not rapid) stream of gold, can help prevent the need for dangerous over-expansion in early parts of the level. Bile demons and dragons are formidable creatures but need to be kept happy a bit more than most of your creatures. The escalation in difficulty is steady but not too onerous (if you want a real challenge try the Deeper Dungeons expansion included in most editions of the game, which will have you weeping in frustration).

The result is a compelling, enjoyable game that takes a fairly small number of assets, ideas and creatures and spins them into a gradually escalating challenge. The story and character elements are slight, but for sheer gameplay Dungeon Keeper is almost unbeatable. It's a rich and enjoyable experience that will make you think and laugh at the same time. Weaknesses? There isn't a huge amount of variety in the actual level design (one underground dungeon looks much like another) and, very occasionally, the game is a little obtuse in how it operates (letting you know you can blast enemies with spells in the combat summary panel as well as the map would have been quite handy).

Dungeon Keeper (*****) is a phenomenally playable game which has withstood the test of time brilliantly. It is available now, with the Deeper Dungeons expansion included, from GOG.

Satellite Reign

The world is controlled by ruthless megacorporations, the most notorious of which is Dracogenics. A group opposed to Dracogenics drop four skilled agents into their largest city, with a simple mission: build up the resources needed to destroy the corporation for good.

Satellite Reign is a real-time tactics game set in a cyberpunk city, some 200 years in the future. You control four agents, each representing a specific class (Soldier, Hacker, Support and Infiltrator), and have a mission to take down and destroy an enemy corporation. Thanks to resurrection technology, your agents are functionally immortal, but each time they regenerate they lose some of their abilities. Fortunately they can be restored by cloning citizens (and, eventually, enemy soldiers), but this comes at its own price of morality, time and the risk of discovery.

The game takes place entirely on one massive map divided into four districts. At the start of the game you are restricted to the Industrial District and have to undertake missions for local criminal gangs and your own bosses. These can involve rescuing someone from custody, assassinating targets or (most commonly) stealing enemy inventions. You can research new technology, such as weapons or augmentations (implants), or equipment such as better armour or energy shields. All of this requires money, which you can obtain through doing missions or hacking ATM machines. This is essential because as you complete missions and move onto new districts of the city, the objectives become tougher, the enemy gain better equipment and the odds start stacking up against you. Research and development is key to you maintaining an edge over the opposition.

Missions can be accomplished in multiple ways. You can sneak into facilities through stealth, perhaps through an air vent or hacking the security cameras and blast doors. You can send in all four team-members or hold some in reserve and send in your infiltrator (complete with his insta-kill melee weapons and cloaking device) alone. You can mind-control enemy soldiers into helping you out by opening doors or providing a diversion. Or you can wade in with all guns blazing and overcome the security forces through superior firepower and tactics. A combined stealth/cover system is employed to help this. Combat is in real-time and can get quite frantic, although an optional bullet time mode can slow things down and allow for more relaxed use of tactics.

Graphically, the game looks gorgeous with some excellent neon-lit buildings and a strong aesthetic style. When you zoom in things get rather less impressive, but you'll spend most of it zoomed out to a reasonable level. The game also features some amazing rain effects, ambient sound and low-fi music, not to mention a cyberspace view which transforms the game into Tron.

The gameplay is generally excellent, with your agents controlled through simple mouse commands and keyboard shortcuts. Like all the best games, Satellite Reign's systems are individually straightforward, but when combined can lead to some splendid sandbox moments, such as when an infiltration goes horribly wrong and you find yourself trapped in an alley, but then the automated turret you hacked on a whim a few minutes earlier suddenly opens up on the enemy and scatters them. It is extremely satisfying to recon a target location, formulate a plan and then successfully execute it, dealing with problems along the way. But it is more fun when things go awry and you have to improvise. The game is tough (especially at the start) but fair. When things go badly wrong and your party is wiped out, you generally know exactly why, how and how you can learn from the experience to improve next time.

There are a few minor issues. The story is pretty much non-existent, relegated to briefings on data consoles and an occasional transmission from your off-screen support. This makes some parts of the game (particularly the eyebrow-raising ending) resonate less strongly than they should. Research is also solely time-dependent, which means if you want to level up and get ahead of the opposition, you can simply spend a couple of hours standing around completing research projects one after the other without actually doing anything else. There's also a few buggy moments, such as when a character passes through a solid door and ends up trapped on the other end, or can't traverse an airvent without getting stuck in an animation loop. These latter issues are very few and far between, especially now the game's received a few solid patches.

For the most part, Satellite Reign (****½) is tremendous fun. Its freeform gameplay, satisfying combat and tremendous sense of atmosphere combine to create something extremely appealing and strategically satisfying, which doesn't outstay its welcome. The game is available now on GoG and Steam.

Comparison with Syndicate

Almost every review of Satellite Reign I've read has commented extensively on its comparisons to the 1993 cyberpunk classic Syndicate, one of my favourite games of all time. I didn't raise this in the main review because I suspect vast numbers of people (the probable majority) playing this game have never played Syndicate and indeed may not have been born when it was released. However, these are my views on how the two games stack up.

Satellite Reign shares a similar visual aesthetic and control scheme to Syndicate, but is much more sophisticated. Satellite Reign has hacking, stealth and cover systems, all lacking from Syndicate. Syndicate is more limited because its missions really revolve around either combat or persuading someone to join you. A few missions could be completed without a shot being fired but these were few and far between. Syndicate was also played on fifty different maps, each supposedly part of a different city, but these were very similar with no major shifts in visual style to differentiate the cities. Satellite Reign has more character and variation in its one city than Syndicate, its expansion (American Revolt) or sequel (Syndicate Wars) combined. Satellite Reign's class system also works better then Syndicate's "four identical people, each toting eight miniguns" approach.

On the other hand, the originals did do a few things better. Syndicate allowed you to use vehicles and its weapons were much punchier. The Persuadatron was ludicrously good fun, and much better than Satellite Reign's more limited person-hacking mechanic. Returning to base between each mission, allowing you to re-arm and research at leisure, was also more enjoyable than the stretches of Satellite Reign when you're just standing in an alley waiting for your shields to recharge or for that new gun to unlock through research. Syndicate Wars also had fully-destructible scenery and allowed you to rotate the camera 360 degrees. Satellite Reign's inability to rotate it more than a few degrees is just odd.

Overall, Satellite Reign is the more sophisticated, varied and compelling game, but there's a few things the old games (can still be picked up from places like GoG) still do better. Certainly Satellite Reign is a more than worthy successor, and a must buy for anyone who was a fan of the original games.

New trailer for SATELLITE REIGN

5 Lives Studios have revealed a launch trailer for their tactical cyberpunk game Satellite Reign.

Satellite Reign is a "spiritual successor" to the classic Bullfrog games Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, created by some of the same personnel. Like those games, Satellite Reign is played from an overhead perspective and is set in an enormous futuristic city. You can rearm and equip agents between missions as well as engaging in research. The game expands on Syndicate's combat-focused gameplay by allowing hacking, stealth and corporate espionage. Your agents are also now specialists, with some being better at certain tasks than others.

The game will be released for PC, Mac and Linux on 28 August. The funky soundtrack to the trailer is "Infiltrate" by Protector 101.

SYNDICATE successor SATELLITE REIGN gets a release date

Satellite Reign, the eagerly-anticipated "successor" to the classic 1990s cyberpunk games Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, will be released on 28 August.

Designed by several of the same team-members as the original Bullfrog games, Satellite Reign is a violent cyberpunk strategy game with you controlling four agents on the streets of a massive, futuristic city. You control the action from overhead and can determine if your agents (each of whom has a specialty class) are to resolve a situation by stealth, frontal assault or hacking.

There are some differences to the original games, with the specialty classes meaning that grouping your agents together for full-scale warfare may not always be the best idea. The game is also continuous in the worldspace, with research and upgrades carried out in the city rather than through a separate option screen. There is also only one (albiet gargantuan) city rather than lots of different cities all over the world.

GoG releases DUNGEON KEEPER for free

GoG have started a Valentine's weekend giveaway. Until Sunday, you can get the original Dungeon Keeper and its expansion pack, The Deeper Dungeons, absolutely free. All you need is a GoG account, which takes just a few seconds to set up if you haven't already got on. You can also get Dungeon Keeper 2 at 75% off its normal (very low) price, which currently works out $1.49 (so, not free but almost).

Dungeon Keeper was originally released in 1997 by the legendary Bullfrog Studios, the same company behind classics such as Populous, Powermonger, Margic Carpet, Theme Hospital and Syndicate. It's a dungeon management game where you play the dungeon keeper, digging out new rooms, giving homes to monsters and setting up puzzles and traps to defeat the invading heroes. It's still one of the (relatively) few games where you play the bad guy. Dungeon Keeper 2, released in 1999, retained much of the same classic gameplay but moved the series into full 3D graphics.

Both games were originally released for Windows 95, but GoG have tweaked them both to work - relatively - stress-free on modern systems. They are both absolutely brilliant, so frankly going to get them for nothing (or almost) is a no-brainer.

Electronic Arts recently caused huge controversy by releasing a mobile/F2P version of Dungeon Keeper for tablets and phones that was absolutely terrible, forcing the player to spend significant amounts of real-world cash to progress anywhere. GoG's move means that people can instead sample the original, superb games for nothing (or almost).

SYNDICATE successor SATELLITE REIGN begins Kickstarter appeal

Back in 1993 Bullfrog released what may have been their finest game: Syndicate. In the game you controlled a team of four cyborg agents from an overhead perspective. They would go from massive cyberpunk city to massive cyberpunk city, carrying out missions that would help your corporation go from a modest start-up to a world-straddling conglomerate. The game was noted for the presence of large numbers of civilians, its living cities (complete with cars, trains and police), its atmospheric soundtrack and its huge arsenal of weapons. The game was also noted for its differing approaches: you could charge through all guns blazing, adopt a stealth approach of using long-range sniper weapons and hiding, or taking control of masses of civilians with a 'Persuadertron' device and using them to rush the enemy with overwhelming numbers. You could also research new technology and make more money between missions from a strategic gameplay mode.

The game spawned an expansion, American Revolt, and then a sequel, Syndicate Wars, in 1996. The sequel was similar, although it removed the limitations of having finite ammo and made all of the buildings in the game fully destructible. In 2012 Starbreeze Studios issued a new game called Syndicate, but this was an FPS lacking anything in common at all with the originals apart from some weapon names. Though on its own terms an okay shooter, the game was heavily criticised for lacking the intelligence and strategic gameplay of the original.

The creators of Syndicate Wars are now Kickstarting a 'spiritual successor', named Satellite Reign in homage to a weapon in Syndicate Wars (the Satellite Rain, which called in a laser strike from an orbiting armed satellite). The new game is similar, with again you using four agents from an overhead perspective. Rather than multiple cities, there is now one huge city and your agents can work for both moral and amoral corporations. Your four agents are also now more specialised, with some RPG elements creeping in.

The blurb:

"Satellite Reign is a real-time, class-based strategy game. You control a squad of four agents, each with distinct and unique abilities as they vie and battle for control of a fully simulated, living, cyberpunk city.

The game world is designed to facilitate emergent gameplay, giving you the tools and freedom to play how you want to play, so you can create strategies and scenarios that not even we had anticipated!

Customise your team with the strength to destroy your enemies head-on, or hack into their facilities to manipulate their infrastructure without them ever knowing you were even there.

Will you take down your enemies with brute-force? Covert espionage and infiltration? Or will you use propaganda to influence the citizens of the city and overthrow the controlling powers?

Satellite Reign will be released on Windows, Mac OS and Linux."

The team are asking for $350,000, which is fairly modest by Kickstarter standards. Their website is here.