Dungeon Keeper (PC, 1997) w/ KeeperFX v.0.5.0b Build 3081
Graphics-8 Sound-8 Control-7.5/8.5* Challenge-7.5 Story-6
Level Design-7.5 Frustration-7/8.5** Fun-8 Originality-7.5
Overall Score-8
*KeeperFX mod
**w/o creature transfer
+
Unique concept and fun to play as the bad guys for a change
Innovative and interesting mechanics (caretaking of creatures and base building combined, pick up creatures and drop them on any conquered tile, make all your (non-imp) creatures attack a certain target with the call to arms spell - see Populous, creatures gain experience via training/fighting and gain new levels up to level 10 (most of them gain new abilities at certain levels), possess any creature to enter a FPS mode, sacrifice creatures at a temple to gain stronger ones or for other positive effects (sacrificing imps at a temple lowers the cost of the spawn imp spell, some combinations complete the current thing being researched at a library or manufactured at a workshop), slap creatures to make them work harder, hold left mouse button to increase effectiveness of spells before casting (costs extra money), imprison/torture/convert enemies (torturing can also make parts of the enemy dungeon become revealed), notifying messages for any event (remove at your own leisure), research spells and traps, each creature has its own personality (needs, weaknesses, skills/spells, rival creature - if they end up in the same lair room they will attack each other+they can't group together in a barracks, flee/chicken mode makes creatures flee if their HP gets very low, can trigger boulder traps manually, ghosts can pass through doors)
Some interesting spells (disease spell - infects other creatures that come into contact with the targeted creature, chicken transformation, invisibility, hold audience - teleports all creatures to your dungeon heart, armageddon - teleports everyone to your heart and forces a battle to the death, destroy wall - weakens and destroys a reinforced wall tile)
Comical tone (dry and sarcastic, possess chickens, make bodies decompose by having hell hounds pee on them in the graveyard)
Fast paced overall (lacks proper speed options though)
Pretty good ambience design (only the on-screen and nearby action is heard) and the game's vibe is somewhat reminiscent of the The Trap Door cartoon. The dungeon heart/HQ's health is represented by a heartbeat which gets faster as it takes damage (it regenerates on its own) - Dungeons of Daggorath
Hotkeys for most useful actions (including zooming in and out the view (home/end) and mini-map, sidebar menus=number keys, backspace=cancel picking up a creature, hotkeys for going to the position/creature that corresponds to a warning message (annoyed creature=ctrl/shift+A, fight=F) and for moving between built rooms, etc.)
Hidden bonus levels, power ups and neutral creatures
Sellable room tiles and traps
Set 1-10 markers/map locations (a chosen position on the map) which you can go to when needed
Battle overview message (lets you use spells and pick up wounded creatures more efficiently - unfortunately if a creature is not currently attacking or getting attacked it disappears from the overview)
Voice taunts (ctrl+f1-8)
Sometimes alternate solutions to scenarios/levels (rushing for a certain resource/tech or training specific creatures, beating the heroes before the rival keeper or vice versa (can also use a transferred creature to rush them), manually controlling a party leader to rush the enemy's dungeon heart, luring the enemy towards another enemy with careful digging, etc)
Good length (20 levels+5 bonus secret levels which are shorter and usually harder (one of them is only available in KeeperFX via Blaise End/level 18))
KeeperFX:
Faster room building via two zoning features (click and drag like in SimCity 2000, can also hold shift and click while building a room to make the game fill out an entire box/rectangle-shaped space OR ctrl to create a 5x5 square room/mark a space for digging - you can also use the numpad numbers for smaller sized square rooms). Can also use shift to sell an entire room at once
Higher resolution=can zoom out further
Command for picking up the strongest or weakest units from a stack (ctrl/shift)
Mouse wheel scrolling for lists
Game speed increase/frameskip (ctrl+"+", - to go back to default)
Video recording, Replay recording, Screenshot feature
Delete current message ley (E, opens the most recent if none are opened)
Zoom to battle+open battle message key (F)
Camera angle snapping to cardinal directions (MMB)
View a possessed unit's stats with E or Q (this also flips to the second page of abilities/spells if they have them)
Corrected stat icons according to what they actually do rather than what the manual incorrectly says they do (for example, skill=the ability to dodge enemy attacks (traps can't be dodged via rolls) so it's now called defense (while defense is renamed armor since it reduces damage rather than lets units avoid damage) and uses the dexterity icon)
Pick up entire gold piles from treasure rooms by holding ctrl
Precise dropping and selling of traps (Alt; with a custom rule set it's possible to place multiple traps on a tile)
Reinforce walls or dig instead of steal a room tile manually while possessing an imp (Shift), Check objects during possession (Alt)
Possession teleport hotkey (definable; for example you can set it up so that pressing W before teleporting takes you to the workshop)
Additional campaigns included
Some enemy AI improvements (for example: will now defend their Dungeon Heart, can now imprison your units)
Various bug fixes
More temple sacrifice combos (one of these hastes your entire army and another makes them fly)
+/-
Save anywhere (8 slots)
You can only lift 8 creatures at a time
Creatures usually don't carry over to the next level (you can sometimes gain the power to transfer one creature to the next level but you won't know beforehand in which levels this happens)
You can form groups of 8 units via a Barracks (the possessed creature becomes the leader) but it doesn't work for some creature combinations
Creature spawning is somewhat random (there are situations where you want specific creatures, you can make unwanted creatures leave though by dropping them at an entrance)
Some spells are super cheap in multiplayer games (boulder trap, break wall)
Computer assistance is an interesting concept but not very useful the way it's executed
Bringing up the options menu doesn't pause the game
Gory (suits the game's atmosphere)
Mission briefings on the map screen tend to not be particularly informative about the mission - instead you get the briefing right after starting
Can't issue orders or do anything else while the game is paused
Most creatures die quickly unless at a high level
Can't reconstruct walls/dug out soil - can use a lava trap to create a tile of lava but this is easily countered with a bridge so it only stops heroes
No area of effect version of the haste spell (with KeeperFX you can achieve it through a sacrifice but it requires a demon spawn and a fly)
Can't create just any creature via the temple (could've been a way around the arbitrary creature limitations of various levels)
Need to go into map view and hover over a group of creatures to check your creatures' levels and it doesn't show their HP (have to hover the mouse pointer over friendly creatures to check their level and HP at the same time unless they're in battle (not needed for enemy creatures) - can use the query tool (question mark/Q) but the camera then centers on the creature
Sight of evil (scouting spell) is a bit slow to use however since it's a cheap spell there's much less of a pause in-between uses compared to scanning in SC1 or photographing or Red Alert (no observer/eye of kilrog-type creature here)+you can use it to attack enemies anywhere on the map if you have the gold
Rushing the enemy with a transferred level 10 creature is usually OP (for example: in level 16 if you rush the enemy keeper with a transferred creature then the scripted hero invasions won't spawn)
Have to use locked doors and guard posts to keep imps/hounds/flies away from hostile territory and traps or manually grab them until the danger is gone
Guard posts can be placed near water or lava to keep non-flying enemies out (perhaps an oversight)
Can't set priority lists like in The Settlers (to make creatures focus on training or imps on fortifying for example)
Kind of strange and non-epic/bombastic ending
KeeperFX:
Can replay Secret 2 for example (giving you a lvl 10 mistress to transfer)
-
Doesn't have much of a cohesive story
Some interface/control issues (room building could've been faster (need to place every tile one at a time, zoning is the same) - fixed in KeeperFX, lack of hotkeys for building a certain room and selecting a certain spell, no box selecting/select by type via shortcut, drop an Imp in front of what you want it to focus on and it might do something else instead - not fixed in KeeperFX (for example in level 15 imps would cross half the map to knock down a locked door or try to claim trapped ground in the middle of the map instead of take over enemy rooms where I dropped/spawned them), inverted up/down view during possession, spells 7-10 are invisible in FPS/possession mode, pressing F to pan the camera to a battle/bring up the battle menu occasionally doesn't work - have to press the notification instead, no hotkey for panning the camera to a newly discovered area - have to open the notification and click the eye symbol, message boxes are placed too close to the lower edge of the screen so you have to be careful when clicking the icons towards the bottom, once in a while there is no text notification when something happens and/or you can't move the camera to the event with a hotkey - only a voice notification (this happens if a creature dies in one hit which can make it hard to tell what happened to your imps if you have many), can't toggle a ban on a certain creature type such as tentacles)
Research is set to a pre-determined order (can be sped up via Sacrifice though, )
No direct control over workshop manufacturing (the workers try to evenly distribute production while prioritizing traps according to this list but you can exclude what is produced by having smaller rooms - for example a single tile only lets them manufacture wooden doors and alarm traps, to access the better traps/tools quicker you should refrain from placing the weaker ones)
Some traps and spells aren't very useful (alarm trap, gas trap, cave-in besides for making vampires not resurrect)
Selecting specific units could've been made more efficient (creatures are hard to spot behind walls (though you can rotate the view), hard to select one creature in a crowd on the same tile)
Training takes too long and some levels don't have an increase level power up (some way to speed it up besides haste, slapping and torturing a creature of the same kind would've been good such as throwing money into a temple well) - for training after having basically beaten a level you can use frameskip in KeeperFX
Micro management heavy (keeping everyone happy and not fighting each other, using spells (especially powered up) and creature skills; general lack of direct unit control outside the possess mode, call to arms and a single squad of 8 units via the barracks - makes battles with other keepers messy since your Imps will move into the frenzy and get killed, and in some later levels imprisoned which makes it more expensive to replace them (in this case you might have to get to the enemy prison and kill the captured imps or use spells to do it))
Sometimes weird AI (powering up a spell targeted at one specific creature causes all creatures on the same tile to stop their actions (same thing happens while slapping or picking up your Imps - good when there's just one but slows you down when several of them stop), your imps tend to forget about gold lying around if when they mined it your treasure room was too small - they also tend to forget or deprioritize gold dropped by killed enemies)
Repetitive in some ways (every stage takes place underground and looks pretty much the same)
Some trial & error (can be hard to tell why a creature is annoyed at times, digging into new areas with traps or enemies in them - can use sight of evil or do a scouting run and then restart however, some negative Sacrifice effects, knowing when the lord of the land will approach, some mechanics like how imps will go further away if the treasure room is larger or torturing one creature makes the others of the same type work harder, which creatures are available in each level, no sight of evil or healing in level 17, ambush attack in level 20 - if you know about it you can trap the area)
Can't play as the good guys?
Uneven volume levels at times
No speed (added in KeeperFX) or difficulty options
Sometimes uneven difficulty (spikes: secret level 1 (baseless maze mission with various traps and you're severely outmanned), level 18 (no transfer creature unless you play one of the secret levels (I transferred a lvl 9 priestess which wasn't enough on her own), the party with two lvl 8 fairies is supposed to attack based on how much gold you've mined but I'm not sure it works properly - when I lucked out and could make them come to me without aid from other parties the rest of the level was pretty easy (had to use a bunch of traps including a lava trap in a corridor right outside my dungeon, in the most recent version of Keeper FX you also can't reach the bile demons in the east from the south; it might be better to carefully dig out parts of the middle instead, the level is also pretty tedious up until the end due to the lack of gold until the end of it+the slow trickle of creatures at first+all the boulder traps and large hero parties you keep running into); dips: level 19 (just time consuming), level 20/final unless you don't prepare for the avatar's ambush with traps in which case it's impossible)
A bit annoying how you can't beat the enemy keeper in the final level besides with tons of boulder traps
KeeperFX:
Most of the temple sacrifice combos aren't useful in the main SP campaign after the first 9-10 levels since you often can't gain the right creatures (beetle, fly, demon spawn, spider)
Bugs/Notes (pre-KeeperFX):
-Using the 'increase level' power ups too quickly after one another will cancel one of them out
-Game sometimes crashes (Win7/Win10; still happens in KeeperFX but it's very rare)
-Infinite Gem bug (not mineable, level 12)
-Bridge bug (bridge tile turns into a wall when Imps mine out an adjacent gold tile - need to sell and rebuild)
KeeperFX ver.:
-At one point (level 17) my level 10 horned reaper wouldn't stop going on a killing spree despite having his own rooms and a temple, eventually making me lose. Apparently you can no longer calm them with money so they're constantly in this mode if they reach it, and there was no must obey spell in this level
Notes:
-Creatures who are immune to gas: Bile Demon, Fairy, Ghost, Skeleton, Vampire, Wizard
Level Design-7.5 Frustration-7/8.5** Fun-8 Originality-7.5
Overall Score-8
*KeeperFX mod
**w/o creature transfer
+
Unique concept and fun to play as the bad guys for a change
Innovative and interesting mechanics (caretaking of creatures and base building combined, pick up creatures and drop them on any conquered tile, make all your (non-imp) creatures attack a certain target with the call to arms spell - see Populous, creatures gain experience via training/fighting and gain new levels up to level 10 (most of them gain new abilities at certain levels), possess any creature to enter a FPS mode, sacrifice creatures at a temple to gain stronger ones or for other positive effects (sacrificing imps at a temple lowers the cost of the spawn imp spell, some combinations complete the current thing being researched at a library or manufactured at a workshop), slap creatures to make them work harder, hold left mouse button to increase effectiveness of spells before casting (costs extra money), imprison/torture/convert enemies (torturing can also make parts of the enemy dungeon become revealed), notifying messages for any event (remove at your own leisure), research spells and traps, each creature has its own personality (needs, weaknesses, skills/spells, rival creature - if they end up in the same lair room they will attack each other+they can't group together in a barracks, flee/chicken mode makes creatures flee if their HP gets very low, can trigger boulder traps manually, ghosts can pass through doors)
Some interesting spells (disease spell - infects other creatures that come into contact with the targeted creature, chicken transformation, invisibility, hold audience - teleports all creatures to your dungeon heart, armageddon - teleports everyone to your heart and forces a battle to the death, destroy wall - weakens and destroys a reinforced wall tile)
Comical tone (dry and sarcastic, possess chickens, make bodies decompose by having hell hounds pee on them in the graveyard)
Fast paced overall (lacks proper speed options though)
Pretty good ambience design (only the on-screen and nearby action is heard) and the game's vibe is somewhat reminiscent of the The Trap Door cartoon. The dungeon heart/HQ's health is represented by a heartbeat which gets faster as it takes damage (it regenerates on its own) - Dungeons of Daggorath
Hotkeys for most useful actions (including zooming in and out the view (home/end) and mini-map, sidebar menus=number keys, backspace=cancel picking up a creature, hotkeys for going to the position/creature that corresponds to a warning message (annoyed creature=ctrl/shift+A, fight=F) and for moving between built rooms, etc.)
Hidden bonus levels, power ups and neutral creatures
Sellable room tiles and traps
Set 1-10 markers/map locations (a chosen position on the map) which you can go to when needed
Battle overview message (lets you use spells and pick up wounded creatures more efficiently - unfortunately if a creature is not currently attacking or getting attacked it disappears from the overview)
Voice taunts (ctrl+f1-8)
Sometimes alternate solutions to scenarios/levels (rushing for a certain resource/tech or training specific creatures, beating the heroes before the rival keeper or vice versa (can also use a transferred creature to rush them), manually controlling a party leader to rush the enemy's dungeon heart, luring the enemy towards another enemy with careful digging, etc)
Good length (20 levels+5 bonus secret levels which are shorter and usually harder (one of them is only available in KeeperFX via Blaise End/level 18))
KeeperFX:
Faster room building via two zoning features (click and drag like in SimCity 2000, can also hold shift and click while building a room to make the game fill out an entire box/rectangle-shaped space OR ctrl to create a 5x5 square room/mark a space for digging - you can also use the numpad numbers for smaller sized square rooms). Can also use shift to sell an entire room at once
Higher resolution=can zoom out further
Command for picking up the strongest or weakest units from a stack (ctrl/shift)
Mouse wheel scrolling for lists
Game speed increase/frameskip (ctrl+"+", - to go back to default)
Video recording, Replay recording, Screenshot feature
Delete current message ley (E, opens the most recent if none are opened)
Zoom to battle+open battle message key (F)
Camera angle snapping to cardinal directions (MMB)
View a possessed unit's stats with E or Q (this also flips to the second page of abilities/spells if they have them)
Corrected stat icons according to what they actually do rather than what the manual incorrectly says they do (for example, skill=the ability to dodge enemy attacks (traps can't be dodged via rolls) so it's now called defense (while defense is renamed armor since it reduces damage rather than lets units avoid damage) and uses the dexterity icon)
Pick up entire gold piles from treasure rooms by holding ctrl
Precise dropping and selling of traps (Alt; with a custom rule set it's possible to place multiple traps on a tile)
Reinforce walls or dig instead of steal a room tile manually while possessing an imp (Shift), Check objects during possession (Alt)
Possession teleport hotkey (definable; for example you can set it up so that pressing W before teleporting takes you to the workshop)
Additional campaigns included
Some enemy AI improvements (for example: will now defend their Dungeon Heart, can now imprison your units)
Various bug fixes
More temple sacrifice combos (one of these hastes your entire army and another makes them fly)
+/-
Save anywhere (8 slots)
You can only lift 8 creatures at a time
Creatures usually don't carry over to the next level (you can sometimes gain the power to transfer one creature to the next level but you won't know beforehand in which levels this happens)
You can form groups of 8 units via a Barracks (the possessed creature becomes the leader) but it doesn't work for some creature combinations
Creature spawning is somewhat random (there are situations where you want specific creatures, you can make unwanted creatures leave though by dropping them at an entrance)
Some spells are super cheap in multiplayer games (boulder trap, break wall)
Computer assistance is an interesting concept but not very useful the way it's executed
Bringing up the options menu doesn't pause the game
Gory (suits the game's atmosphere)
Mission briefings on the map screen tend to not be particularly informative about the mission - instead you get the briefing right after starting
Can't issue orders or do anything else while the game is paused
Most creatures die quickly unless at a high level
Can't reconstruct walls/dug out soil - can use a lava trap to create a tile of lava but this is easily countered with a bridge so it only stops heroes
No area of effect version of the haste spell (with KeeperFX you can achieve it through a sacrifice but it requires a demon spawn and a fly)
Can't create just any creature via the temple (could've been a way around the arbitrary creature limitations of various levels)
Need to go into map view and hover over a group of creatures to check your creatures' levels and it doesn't show their HP (have to hover the mouse pointer over friendly creatures to check their level and HP at the same time unless they're in battle (not needed for enemy creatures) - can use the query tool (question mark/Q) but the camera then centers on the creature
Sight of evil (scouting spell) is a bit slow to use however since it's a cheap spell there's much less of a pause in-between uses compared to scanning in SC1 or photographing or Red Alert (no observer/eye of kilrog-type creature here)+you can use it to attack enemies anywhere on the map if you have the gold
Rushing the enemy with a transferred level 10 creature is usually OP (for example: in level 16 if you rush the enemy keeper with a transferred creature then the scripted hero invasions won't spawn)
Have to use locked doors and guard posts to keep imps/hounds/flies away from hostile territory and traps or manually grab them until the danger is gone
Guard posts can be placed near water or lava to keep non-flying enemies out (perhaps an oversight)
Can't set priority lists like in The Settlers (to make creatures focus on training or imps on fortifying for example)
Kind of strange and non-epic/bombastic ending
KeeperFX:
Can replay Secret 2 for example (giving you a lvl 10 mistress to transfer)
-
Doesn't have much of a cohesive story
Some interface/control issues (room building could've been faster (need to place every tile one at a time, zoning is the same) - fixed in KeeperFX, lack of hotkeys for building a certain room and selecting a certain spell, no box selecting/select by type via shortcut, drop an Imp in front of what you want it to focus on and it might do something else instead - not fixed in KeeperFX (for example in level 15 imps would cross half the map to knock down a locked door or try to claim trapped ground in the middle of the map instead of take over enemy rooms where I dropped/spawned them), inverted up/down view during possession, spells 7-10 are invisible in FPS/possession mode, pressing F to pan the camera to a battle/bring up the battle menu occasionally doesn't work - have to press the notification instead, no hotkey for panning the camera to a newly discovered area - have to open the notification and click the eye symbol, message boxes are placed too close to the lower edge of the screen so you have to be careful when clicking the icons towards the bottom, once in a while there is no text notification when something happens and/or you can't move the camera to the event with a hotkey - only a voice notification (this happens if a creature dies in one hit which can make it hard to tell what happened to your imps if you have many), can't toggle a ban on a certain creature type such as tentacles)
Research is set to a pre-determined order (can be sped up via Sacrifice though, )
No direct control over workshop manufacturing (the workers try to evenly distribute production while prioritizing traps according to this list but you can exclude what is produced by having smaller rooms - for example a single tile only lets them manufacture wooden doors and alarm traps, to access the better traps/tools quicker you should refrain from placing the weaker ones)
Some traps and spells aren't very useful (alarm trap, gas trap, cave-in besides for making vampires not resurrect)
Selecting specific units could've been made more efficient (creatures are hard to spot behind walls (though you can rotate the view), hard to select one creature in a crowd on the same tile)
Training takes too long and some levels don't have an increase level power up (some way to speed it up besides haste, slapping and torturing a creature of the same kind would've been good such as throwing money into a temple well) - for training after having basically beaten a level you can use frameskip in KeeperFX
Micro management heavy (keeping everyone happy and not fighting each other, using spells (especially powered up) and creature skills; general lack of direct unit control outside the possess mode, call to arms and a single squad of 8 units via the barracks - makes battles with other keepers messy since your Imps will move into the frenzy and get killed, and in some later levels imprisoned which makes it more expensive to replace them (in this case you might have to get to the enemy prison and kill the captured imps or use spells to do it))
Sometimes weird AI (powering up a spell targeted at one specific creature causes all creatures on the same tile to stop their actions (same thing happens while slapping or picking up your Imps - good when there's just one but slows you down when several of them stop), your imps tend to forget about gold lying around if when they mined it your treasure room was too small - they also tend to forget or deprioritize gold dropped by killed enemies)
Repetitive in some ways (every stage takes place underground and looks pretty much the same)
Some trial & error (can be hard to tell why a creature is annoyed at times, digging into new areas with traps or enemies in them - can use sight of evil or do a scouting run and then restart however, some negative Sacrifice effects, knowing when the lord of the land will approach, some mechanics like how imps will go further away if the treasure room is larger or torturing one creature makes the others of the same type work harder, which creatures are available in each level, no sight of evil or healing in level 17, ambush attack in level 20 - if you know about it you can trap the area)
Can't play as the good guys?
Uneven volume levels at times
No speed (added in KeeperFX) or difficulty options
Sometimes uneven difficulty (spikes: secret level 1 (baseless maze mission with various traps and you're severely outmanned), level 18 (no transfer creature unless you play one of the secret levels (I transferred a lvl 9 priestess which wasn't enough on her own), the party with two lvl 8 fairies is supposed to attack based on how much gold you've mined but I'm not sure it works properly - when I lucked out and could make them come to me without aid from other parties the rest of the level was pretty easy (had to use a bunch of traps including a lava trap in a corridor right outside my dungeon, in the most recent version of Keeper FX you also can't reach the bile demons in the east from the south; it might be better to carefully dig out parts of the middle instead, the level is also pretty tedious up until the end due to the lack of gold until the end of it+the slow trickle of creatures at first+all the boulder traps and large hero parties you keep running into); dips: level 19 (just time consuming), level 20/final unless you don't prepare for the avatar's ambush with traps in which case it's impossible)
A bit annoying how you can't beat the enemy keeper in the final level besides with tons of boulder traps
KeeperFX:
Most of the temple sacrifice combos aren't useful in the main SP campaign after the first 9-10 levels since you often can't gain the right creatures (beetle, fly, demon spawn, spider)
Bugs/Notes (pre-KeeperFX):
-Using the 'increase level' power ups too quickly after one another will cancel one of them out
-Game sometimes crashes (Win7/Win10; still happens in KeeperFX but it's very rare)
-Infinite Gem bug (not mineable, level 12)
-Bridge bug (bridge tile turns into a wall when Imps mine out an adjacent gold tile - need to sell and rebuild)
KeeperFX ver.:
-At one point (level 17) my level 10 horned reaper wouldn't stop going on a killing spree despite having his own rooms and a temple, eventually making me lose. Apparently you can no longer calm them with money so they're constantly in this mode if they reach it, and there was no must obey spell in this level
Notes:
-Creatures who are immune to gas: Bile Demon, Fairy, Ghost, Skeleton, Vampire, Wizard