Dungeon Keeper

Dungeon Keeper is a bad game that desperately tries to emulate Clash of Clans and its business model, but with no success. There's nothing of the original franchise in Mythic's game, there are just long waits and annoying money requests.

It could've been a chance to give a second life to an old classic, but EA got this all wrong. The managing side is poor, and a greedy microtransaction system ultimately spoils the fun.

Dungeon Keeper is structured in such a way that you can go several days without making significant progress, and at that point the enjoyable invasions just aren't enough to make the game worthwhile.

It's a huge shame, because Dungeon Keeper is such a great franchise. I vividly remember getting hooked on the original for the very first time, and hooking in non-strategy fans with its unique perspective and visual style. But you're getting none of that here, as you're instead presented with a hollow freemium shell of what once was.

Instead of feeling like the keeper of a dungeon, it made me feel like I was being kept in one.

The tragedy of Dungeon Keeper is that every so often, it shows glimpses of what makes it great. You can see the classic game is in there somewhere: its genius, and what it could have been. But then the gates slam shut, as though the Dungeon Keeper himself is kept in a larger meta-dungeon, whose bean-counting overlord tells you to come back later, or maybe even tomorrow. Or pay up.

In the end, I can't imagine Dungeon Keeper is going to satisfy anyone very much.

Dungeon Keeper is a new mobile free to play game by EA, and one of the most aggressive games in the genre. It has elements of a game, but these are so well hidden beneath shiny buttons, childish images and tons of tough rock, that it’s better to avoid the dungeon altogether.

Dungeon Keeper is an anti-game. It sucks the joy of gaming out of me and it has no redeeming qualities, not in the slightest. Calling it greedy would be understatement of the year. The already tarnished image of free-to-play could hardly receive a more devastating blow than that which Dungeon Keeper has given it. It eats at my soul every time I play it. And that's why I'll uninstall, nay, banish it from my tablet as soon as I've finished this sentence.

What we have here is the shell of Bullfrog's pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans. Every function, every mechanism, every online feature has been tried and tested already by Supercell's money machine and EA is following behind, drooling like a Pavlovian dog. That's what stings the most: not that Dungeon Keeper has gone free-to-play, but that it's done so in such soulless fashion.

How dare you to soil a classic like that. This is the epitome of in-app-pestilence. The paid content gets a grip on the gaming experience way too quickly. What once was one of Bullfrog's finest masterpieces now is nothing more than a soulless marketing product.