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.

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).

Fable: The Lost Chapters

A while ago the SF&F blogosphere was rocked (okay, slightly tilted) by accusations of publishers 'overhyping' their books and leaving disillusioned reviewers giving overtly harsh reviews to books which they'd have enjoyed more if they'd come to them fresh. It was a bit of a three-minute wonder in which the particular accused publisher pointed out that their 'hype' consisted of them saying they thought the book was good and the author saying they thought the book was good, which isn't so much 'hype' as 'their job'. 'Hype' on the other hand is what Peter Molyneux does very well.


For those not in the know, Peter Molyneux is responsible for many of the greatest computer games of all time, from 1980s strategy classic Populous and its superior sequel through Powermonger, Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper. As the creator of Bullfrog Studios, Molyneux is also responsible for giving us the godlike Syndicate (although he didn't have that much to do with it, which may or may not be telling; okay, it is telling). In the late 1990s Molyneux left Bullfrog, which had been absorbed by the glutinous mass that was and still is EA Games, and set up a new studio called Lionhead. At this point Molyneux decided that having his hand in several of the greatest games ever made meant that any game he automatically created in the future would also be blindingly amazing and thus announced that his new company's first game would be a work of towering and astronomical genius which would force anyone who played it to explode from the sheer awesomeness of playing the game. Unfortunately the game design department didn't get the memo, as instead they made Black and White, which was not very good, although it did allow you to feed people to a giant cow and then beat it up.

Undaunted by the mauling of his bovine-abuse simulator, Molyneux unleashed his hype on the company's new RPG, Fable. The game would have immense moral consequences, where every NPC had a different attitude towards you and would remember your actions towards them, where it would be possible to get married, have kids and a home life between adventures and the game would subtly adjust to the choices you made. Needless to say, very little of this actually appeared in the game, which turned out to be BioWare-lite.

So ignoring the hype, what about the actual game? Well, you start off as a young scamp in your home village where peace and happiness spread until bad people turn up, torch the village, kidnap your mother and sister and butcher your father to death in front of you. Luckily, a wise old mentor/wizard Obi-Wan figure turns up, rescues you, and whisks you off to the 'Hero Guild' where you get to train your sword, archery and spellcasting abilities until you are ready to face the world and take on some quests. The 'twist' is that you get to decide whether you are a good person or a bad person. Erm, you know, the 'twist' that RPGs as far back as 1996's Fallout had pretty much included as a matter of course? Of course, the game doesn't really allow you to turn out to be a really evil SOB and follow the ramifications of that logically, so you can butcher your friends, torch multiple villages, kill hundreds of innocents and still be allowed back into the Guild to pick up a new quest, level up and follow the main story, which is pretty forgiving of them.

The additional stuff is pretty much worthless. You can get married, but all that does is give you a different home base and an NPC wife (the game doesn't even allow you to play a female hero, although the sequel does) who just parrots random dialogue at you. You can't have kids, and all this scene-setting gubbins really does is distract from the meat of the game, which is performing quests. You gain quests from the guild (and occasionally other places) which require you to head off into the wilderness and perform convoy, protection or rescue missions for various people. There are also very occasional 'evil' quests as well, but these are few and far between. The main story picks up at fairly frequent intervals and draws you along a path of self-discovery as you learn more about the world and your background.

At this point Fable kicks into life. The story is unoriginal, but nicely executed. There's some strong voice acting and a decent sense of humour. The combination of combat and spells is nicely done, although ranged combat turns out to be a waste of time. I think I used my bow about four times in the whole game. Swordplay and magic will get you through most circumstances. The game is also interesting in that it doesn't force you to become a fighter, mage or archer as you divide experience points between the three as you choose, allowing a decent level of customisation. There's also a nice variety of enemies to fight. However, towards the end of the story you become so ridiculously powerful that even the extremely tough new enemies introduced in the 'Lost Chapters' at the end of the game (not included in the original, X-Box-only version) do not present much of a challenge.

Even with the addition of the 'Lost Chapters' material the game is also fairly short for an RPG, coming in at the 12-hour mark including all the side quests. However, the game's relative easiness as well as its more light-hearted approach does make it a decent RPG for beginners than something more hardcore like Baldur's Gate II or even Fallout 3, and more experienced gamers will find it stands up quite well as an enjoyable game, though not one that is breaking any boundaries.

Fable (***½) is a fun, light and amusing game which is pretty entertaining. Although it is on the short side, this has to be balanced against the fact that you can typically find copies for £5-£10, since it is four years old now, and for that price is excellent value for money. And for that same reason you can pretty much ignore the hype as well and take the game for what it is: a solid amount of fun. The game is available now in the UK (PC, Mac, original X-Box) and USA (PC, Mac, original X-Box).