22.8 hours played
Written 26 days ago
There's much to like... and much to dislike.
Dungeon building is quite fun in this game. Being able to build across multiple levels of the tower is a nice gimmick. The way the economy is run based on the tavern is also interesting, and you'll probably devote an entire floor of your dungeon just to your tavern and supporting rooms. The room editor is great, allowing you to freely edit, redesign and even move rooms. There are a fair few jokes in the campaign that actually land, especially with regards to the enemy factions. There's also at least 10 hours or so of content for you in your first campaign playthrough.
The main drawbacks are the VIPs, poor design choices, and the bugs.
The VIPs (important NPCs) in this game, are just annoying to deal with. At the start they're funny, but their characters are so shallow they quickly become tiresome. The wizard for example being constantly lazy, yet also bringing trouble on himself, isn't funny after the first 12 times it happens. Thankfully you can completely ignore most of the major NPCs if you just skip their dialogue... but the worst one of all is the demon, who is just incredibly irritating in the campaign. I realize he's a character their designers love... because he's the secret boss of the RPG version of this game... but honestly the game would be better without him in it.
The poor design choices are incredibly frustrating at times. No, I don't want to build 100 identical copies of a shelf to store my resources. No, I don't like having my "100% chance" mission fail for some unknown reason. No, I don't enjoy the fact that access to everything is gated by this weird prestige gimmick where I can't build most things until I throw a bunch of unnecessary gold statues into the bathroom to deem it "high quality" enough to unlock the ability to construct a toilet paper rack. No, I don't like how the map seems so static, it limits replay value. No, I don't like the way trolls/vampires constantly kill their allies and produce death notifications for each ally they kill. All of these things are just irritating.
The worst aspect of this game is the bugs. For example, at one point I ended up with a key room being uneditable, unusable and undeletable. At another point, I had to blindly click every button on the screen because it appeared all but one of them were disabled and only clicking the minion button let me proceed, even though all buttons, including the minion button, appeared unclickable. This was at the point in the campaign where you first teleport a magic user, if you're curious. The point is both of these bugs forced me to lose quite a bit of progress, the latter force-quitting the game until I eventually worked out a solution. Such things may be OK in demos, but these sort of bugs need to be FIXED before you start charging for your game.
I do like the game. It is an interesting take on dungeon management. It really is interesting. It plays differently than all the other dungeon keeper clones. But, early on, it can be pretty frustrating at times... and there are a lot of very questionable design choices. Sometimes it feels like a game designer was given free run to do whatever they wanted... and they did not always stop to consider if what they're doing would actually be fun to play through.