In praise of EA's much maligned Dungeon Keeper

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hello this is John from pocketgamer.biz the game we going to look at today is Dungeon Keeper so it's game that's been um kind of controversial I guess in some people's eyes it's a remake of an old PC franchise that was obviously a paid game and now it's been remade um as a free-to-play game of for some of the fans of the original game that's produced some a um particularly um in terms of the weight times it takes to the times it takes to to build things or dig things out in the game personally I haven't had any problems with that at all um I've been playing the game since it came out so that's kind of getting on for a year now soly kind of 10 months or so so um the only problem I the real problem with the game is it loading it tends to take a long time to load but it seems to be not doing too badly today so it gets the stage where it loads 90% then for some odd reason it has to um almost this

splash screen comes in I have to swipe the foolish imp to continue but I guess that's a way of controlling their server cost I suppose um seeing who's actually playing and not um just loading up um so there we go oh was nice I've League I've ranked up my league how I've done that there we go let's put some music on okay I've also been attacked but as we can see um the My Invader was a thrown scent packing so my score went up by 47 so if I wonder I can see a play of how he failed but that this is my Bas Dungeon Keeper has in keeping with the original game um basically the point is to build a dungeon so this is as I said I've been playing this for about 10 months now so it's a fairly Advanced dungeon as you can see and this is the heart of it and then I built um these kind of store rooms for gold and stone which are the main soft resources so these are basically where I get some resources here so that's just you can see my Golden Stone reserves going up there okay so that's obviously in here

and then there are other types of buildings there's some hatcheries in here there's a dark Library where I can search spells and then you can see there's these kind of convoluted little kind of passageways joining M up so the point of Dungeon Keeper is you create a dungeon people try to attack your dungeon you attack other people's dungeons so you want to make your dungeon hard to attack um in terms of how the kind of game works actually um so the these um soft currency points these These are where people can attack so these so it's going to tap my base it be from one of these points that they'd attack um if they take over a room they can then spawn troops within that room so the kind of the starting point would be one of these and then you can build into the base so basically what I've done here is these all have to be there has to be a connection from all the store rooms into your into your base that's the kind of basic kind of connection so but um I've kind of um spent a long time creating this kind of moat all the way around so this is the only direct route in someone could could go into from one of these so you could attack here and then kind of fight your way through all

the way through here you can see I've kind of built some heavy defenses around here and some doors and this something's being upgraded here one of these um spike traps is being upgraded um of course this being a game there's lots ways of doing stuff so the other way you can if you wanted to you can see I've tried to build um these these uh stones with dots on these are reinforced ones so you need bombs basically to break through so someone could just um kind of have a bomb and kind of put some bombs down and try and break in and there's other ways of attacking bases obviously but this is a um I've tried to make my base as 4i as possible you can see there's some other base stuff going on here so I'm I want to redu increase this Gap from one stone to more so I'm going to kind of re-root my um Corridor through there um other things going on here so let see we've got soft currency hard currency so if I want to update something um see what I can update a little door I can update that it's going to cost me eight stone so 8K Stone to upgrade so do that um in

terms of the gold that's basically what we use um see if I can upgrade something here if I can train someone so I can train a one of my minions I can train a troll up a level um so that's going to uh take some of my gold okay OB there's a hard currency so you look here if I wonder who I've got this this is currency I have spent money in the game not a lot of money um about $10 um and you ear obviously as you go on so I've got this hard I could speed up for one or two it's going to take two days for this to happen this is one of the kind of um controversies with Dungeon Keeper that people thought the um the build times were very long um I mean that's a matter of subjection really isn't it um I think EA kind of suggested at launch that they probably could have tuned it better but I've never really had a problem with you know playing a game and setting something going and coming back uh sometime later so these are my imps so this in s this is a kind of basic um as we see with Clash of Clans a basic

kind of Base building type uh monetization so you get the first two imps for free you see they're working away here this one's got 9 hours this one's got uh about 5 hours that someone just started building that door and these two aren't doing at the moment I'll give them something to do in a minute I can summon some more so these ones I've bought it's a typical thing called I call it the three Builder kind of um monetization technique so you get two basically for free the next one um cost money so it's five it's $5 for the next one effec if you buy it straight off you can grind it out the currency if you want and then I bought the fourth one as well if I want to buy fifth one I can spend money obviously I going to spend real money cuz I'm not got enough currency I was kind of think when you have two it kind of Builders adding a third one obviously increases your productivity 50% um adding a fourth one then increases it 25% so if I added a fifth one i' be increasing it 20 20% so you kind of into diminishing returns really um so um so you can see that I thing I'm doing here is I'm kind of U this is a bit

ridiculous really but I'm reducing going to go around these um I built these connecting tunnels I you see there a step back so there's they're all on this kind of um line here but I can take them a step further away from my um from my uh from my um rooms if I want to so I'm doing that there but actually I'm going to do this here so I'm doing a new connection I'm going to conect these up so these are soft rocks so these go these you build really quickly these CU I've already built these and refilled them in again you have this process of so pretty much um I could build some more traps really um but there not most of these most of these um traps I I have to um I'm up to my limits is why they grayed out um but you can just fill dirt in so you basically end up the thing I really like about dungeon keyboard is you kind of end up kind of building stuff out and then filling stuff in so you can see the

these ones am I going to do that there not going do that so I'm going to take my route here so P that one out 3 seconds but now um I'm going to build out this one so this is not a soft rock that's going to take four hours to build out um so and another one here so build that out and then so now you can see all my four rimps are being used there's an efficiency boost is a just cute little thing slap them around dungeon Key's always about kind of dark humor and they're going to work twice as fast now for 4 hours I guess it's kind of Engagement retention thing you might come back you get a little push notification after 4 hours saying that they're not working as hard as they could do so that's the kind of the base building side of it um so there is a battle stuff I can go and battle people I've not really in terms of this game I've not really done very much of battling other people um I've just been involved in in in more kind of building my base and that's kind of satisfied me um I think I've probably got some because I leveled up I've got some

I've got a list achievement oh know was that um anyway see my achievements and when I've completed these I'm going to get some more of the hard currency what that's giving me a notification for then oh no okay I got promoted to go to so I got 100 that's not too bad um and you can see if you want to buy some currency we can go in here bu currency it's pretty standard um kind of set up so the most expensive one is £70 $100 cheapest one is £3 so what's that that's um $5 if you the more you spend you kind of get a get a better kind of um unit rate per per dollar it's trying to entice me with saying this one the $20 one is the most popular um another kind of interesting part thing of the game you can't actually buy you can't buy soft currency directly but basically they use

what I call a percentage fill system so if I want to fill my um fill my capacity that I have um I can spend kind of currency hard the hard currency the gems to do that so I can fill at 100% 50% or 25% this is kind of something that kind of came in was a Vogue that came in really last year um I'm not really sure how popular it's been I think it's quite confusing for people and actually the rates you get if you look into this the rates you get depending on um the capacity you've got in your in your um in this case kind of gold storage or or or stone storage can be very different so I think it doesn't provide a great consumer um transparency kind of process you can see I've got loads of gold I've not really really been doing the battling side of the game hardly got Not much got not got much done because I've been doing quite a lot of the building side of the game so anyway so that's Dungeon Keeper I mean I think it's a game that's been um kind of slightly kind of kind of had a bad reputation for people who haven't really played it very much people down loaded it and and

started it off and the first experience wasn't very good and then they just dumped it which is obvious what happens with a lot of free toplay games you know normally You' expect um your kind of a kind of one day your one day retention to be you know a lot of games is less than 50% so half people download a game never never start it again and for some games even less than that so I think um that's just freeto play um situation that's how it is um it does I think make you realize that there was a I think there's a good game here um but obviously if you're losing maybe for Dungeon keeper people were downloading it just to get offended by it and then go on Twitter and tell everyone how offended they were but it does make you realize how how the kind of the the first kind of experiences the first impressions particularly in free to-play games which is just so um frictionless is very important um but I'm going to keep playing it Cu uh I'm enjoying it so um maybe we'll come back in a couple of months and we can see if my uh base has improved at all so that's Dungeon Keeper