Blast from the Past: The Oldies This Week

Every week I'm going to talk about a great game made a long time ago. I've been replaying these games because I'm out of money for new games right now and I wish to share my experiences revisiting them.

This week: Dungeon Keeper 2.

Dungeon keeper 2 is a RTS-God game, a game where you have a 1st person perspective from above and command various little creatures, much like an RTS, but you cannot give explicit controls to those creatures.
Of course, there are ways around that, as I'll explain later.

The story behind the game is that you are the keeper of a dungeon. A magical being who lives underground and creates a place where the monsters who were chased away from the surface world can thrive. Your objective is to kill the heroes who possess the portal gems that would allow you to invade the surface realm.

You start each map having a dungeon heart, pictured on the right. From there you order your worker imps to dig paths through the dirt and pave them. Once they are paved you can build different rooms and depending on which rooms you have, different creatures will appear in your dungeon. For example, once you have built a workshop, trolls and later bile demons will appear in your dungeon. Meanwhile, the good humans and their allies (good creatures like the elves or faries) will try to destroy your dungeon by attacking it in various waves.

To stop them from succeeding in destroying you you can place traps in your dungeon or train your creatures into a mighty army in the training room and combat pit. You can also cast spells to destroy the invaders. The spells you have must be researched by warlocks or vampires in your library and give you a whole new level of immersion into the game. Throughout my play-through the two spells I used the most were the call to arms spell, which makes all your monsters drop what they're doing and swarm to the place where the spell is cast, and the possession spell, which lets you take control of one of your monsters and from there you can issue orders to a small group of other monsters you control. But of course there are more destructive spells like lighting bolt and inferno and helpful spells like heal.

There are different modes of play including a great single player campaign, with great story and voice acting, a sandbox mode, which lets you mess around on different maps with different restrictions, and even a multiplayer mode, so you can play with your friends if they still own a copy of this great game.

The game is a lot of fun and by now you can probably find a working copy of the game for very little cash. Another piece of good news is that this is an old game which actually works on Windows Vista (not sure if it works on 7 though). If you found this review interesting, I suggest you do pick it up somewhere.