Dungeons 4 Review

I’m something of a do-gooder, if the truth be told. I can’t lie; I’m too poor to indulge in any dodgy substances, and I rarely borrow books from the library, so returning them late isn’t a risk. I’ve never even got a parking ticket, although that’s probably largely attributed to the fact that I can’t drive. Either way, I quite like playing as the antagonist in games every now and then to get a sense of how it is to be the bad guy for a change. Dungeons 4 is the latest from Kalypso Media, which sees you play as the archetypal evil megalomaniac, trying to take over the world with the aid of a dungeon full of monsters and meanies.

Diggy diggy hole, diggy diggy hole, etc.

Full disclosure: I haven’t played the earlier titles in the series, so this is my entry point. Thankfully, it isn’t necessary to have played the first three in order to enjoy this fourth installment as I had no trouble at all in picking up the idea. If you’re in the same boat, wondering if you need to catch up first, then there’s no need to fret. The first few levels do a great job of introducing the game’s mechanics with a slow and steady pace, so you’ll be destroying Heroes in no time at all.

The game isn’t entirely dissimilar to the Bullfrog classic Dungeon Keeper but with the addition of a number of RTS elements. You start out building your base in the underworld, but you will need to gain “Evilness” in order to research stronger monsters and new or upgraded rooms to build. This is earned by killing Heroes, and whilst you will get some come into your base, the main source is above ground by infiltrating the Heroes at their camps. This means that you have to carefully balance the base-building below ground with the looting and pillaging above it. There is a cap on the number of creatures that you can have, meaning that you have to assess just how many of your troops you can risk sending on the surface to destroy Hero camps. Send out too few, and they’ll just get killed in action, but send out too many, and your base might be at risk of being invaded and destroyed. This is only a part of the game, and the base-building aspect is still the most prominent, but having this blend of genres does a lot to differentiate it from the earlier games that inspired it.

Welcome to my dungeon; I hope you like magma and saw blades.

One thing that really got to me was the forced cheesiness of the game. There’s a serious-sounding narrator who describes everything in a very Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy manner, and the voice acting for the game’s characters itself is incredibly caricatured. It’s an intentional choice, I’m sure, but I just found some of the characters to be a bit grating. Our main protagonist (if you can call her that), Thalya the Dark Elf, reminds me a bit of Queenie from Blackadder, but I feel like even Miranda Richardson wouldn’t be able to pull off high-pitched petulance for 40-odd hours without it coming across as a little bit grating. The same applies to her in-game brother Tristan, who is a whiny little spoiled brat. There were points where I just muted the sound and put on some music instead to give my ears a rest.

This isn’t the fault of the voice actors themselves, in my opinion, but the script, which was designed to be full of tropes in order for the narrator to be snarky about them. A good example is how we are looking for the “stones of finitude” in order to put them in the “gauntlet of finitude” and change history. There’s no attempt to hide the hackneyed, rip-off plot, and the narrator and Thalya have a number of exchanges about how this is clearly lifted directly from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s a choice, but it also feels a bit cheap to boot, and it detracts from an otherwise pretty solid title.

I sense some "inspiration" here.

Ignoring the dubious script, I found Dungeons 4 to be pretty well crafted overall. Some of the later levels got a bit unnecessarily hectic, with an insane number of strong enemies being thrown at you super quickly, but nothing was ever completely insurmountable. My favourite mechanic was the traps, which can be linked together in order to make it difficult for your enemies to even make it inside your base. Combined with carving out long, winding corridors, I was able in the later parts of the game to have a fully self-sustaining base where no Hero actually managed to make it all the way inside. It’s perhaps not as complex and satisfying as something like Evil Genius, but it’s certainly close.

In conclusion, if you like a good villain protagonist and you want to play something that’s got a slight twist on the base-building genre, then you can’t go far wrong with Dungeons 4. There are a few ropey bits to the writing, and the difficulty can get a bit spikey, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

The cut scenes are largely hand-drawn in this quirky style.