Impire

On the surface Impire shows some promising ideas. But the deeper you dig the more you realize that almost everything stays superficial and offers hardly any challenge.

A muddled collection of good ideas, Impire has charm enough but its flaws are likely to frustrate most players.

Pick this one up from Steam if you’re truly desperate for another attempt at playing the role of an evil dungeon overlord. If you’re waiting for a great game in that genre, however, pass this one by.

In an attempt to insert into Impire too many ideas and different features inspired by other games in the genre, Cyanide Montreal has created a product characterized by an extremely limiting gameplay, ironically making the game even more repetitive than it would have been with a simpler formula.

The interface is a cumbersome mess, as if Cyanide Montreal, the game’s developer, had never played a real-time strategy game before. The offensive and defensive components of the missions don’t complement each other; they just get in each other’s way and disrupt each other. It takes a half hour or more to build up your dungeon so you can go on the offensive, but this part of the game is nearly identical for each mission, which is tedious.

Impire does have an interesting approach to resources, with its above world raids (it’s a 2D map) and points system of dungeon upgrades based on performance but, ultimately, Impire is flawed, conceptually and technically.

Impire would be below average strategy game in the spirit on Dungeon Keeper, but thanks to really awful, long-winded and unfunny attempts of humour, it becomes something much, much worse. [Apr 2013]

I don't see much sense in buying Impire. The game is mediocre and has no redeeming qualities in its multiplayer mode (the only thing you do is bring more and more monsters to the battle). Why such a "high" grade then? Impire can be quite fun in small doses. The single player campaign is pleasant and the game looks nice (with the exception of cut-scenes), but that's pretty much it. If you need a good Dungeon Keeper-like game, you should go and play Dungeon Keeper 2.

A game similar to Dungeon Keeper but worse in every aspect. [CD-Action 05/2013, p.76]

Impire is an RTS dressed up in the clothes of an dungeon builder. Even though the initial presentation is appealing, the lack of interesting mechanics sets it up for rather monotone and dull game-play in the long run.

I wish I had nicer things to say about Impire, but my disappointment with its failure to turn any of its concepts into interesting interactive gameplay is total. As cool as the concept is, gamers interested in building an underground lair and tormenting would-be heroes are still stuck waiting for a worthy successor to 1997's Dungeon Keeper.

Building a dungeon and fighting for world domination as a bad guy: familiar territory that doesn’t bore quickly. But Impire lacks focus, feels messy and requires lots of patience. Because of this, playing it often feels like a chore. Impire has a bunch of good ideas, of which none are well developed.

It does nothing particularly well – in fact, a number of mechanics are an active detriment to the experience, like food – but it also doesn’t do anything particularly poorly. The best way to describe it is tepid.

Impire is not the Dungeon Keeper clone you might have come to expect. It's a micro-management squad based game, kind of clunky and repetitive, but still well-written and funny. If you have time to enjoy the solo campaign, why not, but waiting for a Steam promotion wouldn't be ill-advised.

Impire is a real-time strategy game with big ideas, but it's not well-developed. If you’re waiting for a great RTS game, you must know that Impire is very repetitive and superficial.

Quotation forthcoming.

The troubled real-time strategy dungeon sim Impire fails to recapture the charms of its inspirations.

A boring strategy game that engulfs the player in repeating the same game-mechanics on every map.

Impire got old even before it came out, and its dated visuals are not the only problem. As someone who played Dwarf Fortress a lot, I can get used to poor quality graphics, but drab gameplay, forced jokes, buggy multiplayer and complete lack of fresh ideas will be the downfall of Impire.

It won’t scratch the Dungeon Keeper itch because it has no ecosystem – it’s an RTS rather than a dungeon-building game. But it also won’t scratch the RTS itch because it’s repetitive, offers little strategic challenge, and is deeply, deeply tedious.

All the potential was wasted on missions that amount to simple copy-and-paste tactics punctuated by jokes that are an acquired taste, to say the least. It's stitched together with big ideas and interesting concepts, but it never even comes close to being the sum of its parts.

Impiously impractical in implementation, impressive only to the impetuous. [Apr 2013, p.88]

It's repetitive, disposable and artificially inflated. Most of all it's frustrating: frustrating because of the poor execution of a promising concept and because it's nowhere near the game that it could have been.

While it's still easing you into the pain to come during the first couple of hours, you can catch a glimpse of the good game this should be in the absence of draconian micromanagement and unfulling base building. It's especially apparent in the multiplayer mode (provided you can finish without a crash), where you might even have fun battling it out in Team Deathmatch or Capture the Flag (er, dragon) in the shared dungeon that smartly keeps each player's base inviolate.

There are good ideas in this attempt at a dungeon simulator, but the execution is poor. The constant micro management becomes a chore, and the lack of any meaningful interaction with both units and dungeon ensures the highs are few and far between.

The mission structure is repetitive, the basic gameplay is far from engaging, and I might even have fallen asleep at some point while playing. Impire is monotonous, banal and boring, and I can’t wait to forget about it in the coming weeks.