While I love the concept of mashing together brothel management and a Dungeon Keeper-style dungeon sim, the execution was disappointing. While I deeply appreciate the effort that went into the game, with a variety of animations, races, and buildings, those elements fail to cohere in a compelling gameplay package.
The breakneck pace of development in your camp means you rarely have an opportunity to sit back and smell the roses; instead, you're constantly shifting things from one place to another. While you're constantly busy, you're never really afforded an opportunity to become engaged with the operations of the dungeon. The top-down perspective keeps you far removed from the action the vast majority of times, something agitated further by the prevalence of "mating press" sex positions that cover up the action entirely. For a game that is pretty much *entirely* sex, it felt more like managing a spreadsheet than it did being a goblin slave-wizard. Coupled with a repetitive and incongruous soundtrack (a single song), and I felt like I was falling asleep during a particularly tedious day at the office.
You quickly wind up with enough slaves that they don't even have an identity. This can be a difficult balancing act even in sandbox games with a roleplaying focus like Lab Rats 2, but here it reaches extreme levels, made worse by their similar statlines and that the stats are hidden in a menu. Contrast with something like the village management in the recently-released Mad Island, or even the generic creatures featured in Dungeon Keeper; either the characters need enough of an identity to sustain the player projecting a story on them, or statistics that lead to substantial differences in their behavior that creates a story through the game mechanics. As it stands, even the ones who appeared attractive were as forgettable as an individual checker piece. If you're hoping for some emergent storytelling, it's not there; the characters are just blips you cycle through facilities with animations you won't have an opportunity to watch. The hidden nature of their stats makes them inordinately fragile, so you're none too likely to even have the opportunity to develop a favorite before they're discarded.
The most disappointing part of the game is that there was clearly a possibility of something fun in here.
The amount of micromanagement distracts from the sexual components of the game. The solution, offered by Dungeon Keeper, would be automation; start the game by breeding goblin slaves that actively carry out the tedium of running the dungeon. Show them running around. Limit the number of "regular" slaves to a level where I at least recognize them visually, and have their rotation between facilities be something visually happening in the dungeon through character movement instead of being a race to drag and drop. A "living" dungeon would also help justify the topdown POV: as it stands, it feels more like the ultimate validation of Black-market, Monster Black-market, and other brothel management games that opt for a "dollhouse" side view that keeps the action on-screen and is convenient for dragging and dropping.
A lot of this could be mitigated by a slower pace. The time tracking and random assignment of missions gives you very little chance to enjoy what you're building. Let the player select missions instead of it being a mad dash.
All-in-all, I can't really put my stamp of approval on this. While I wish the dev all the best on future projects, particularly because I've been regularly searching "Dungeon Keeper" on this forum from my first day joining it and would love to see it done right, this first stab at realizing that concept missed both its heart and soul.
The breakneck pace of development in your camp means you rarely have an opportunity to sit back and smell the roses; instead, you're constantly shifting things from one place to another. While you're constantly busy, you're never really afforded an opportunity to become engaged with the operations of the dungeon. The top-down perspective keeps you far removed from the action the vast majority of times, something agitated further by the prevalence of "mating press" sex positions that cover up the action entirely. For a game that is pretty much *entirely* sex, it felt more like managing a spreadsheet than it did being a goblin slave-wizard. Coupled with a repetitive and incongruous soundtrack (a single song), and I felt like I was falling asleep during a particularly tedious day at the office.
You quickly wind up with enough slaves that they don't even have an identity. This can be a difficult balancing act even in sandbox games with a roleplaying focus like Lab Rats 2, but here it reaches extreme levels, made worse by their similar statlines and that the stats are hidden in a menu. Contrast with something like the village management in the recently-released Mad Island, or even the generic creatures featured in Dungeon Keeper; either the characters need enough of an identity to sustain the player projecting a story on them, or statistics that lead to substantial differences in their behavior that creates a story through the game mechanics. As it stands, even the ones who appeared attractive were as forgettable as an individual checker piece. If you're hoping for some emergent storytelling, it's not there; the characters are just blips you cycle through facilities with animations you won't have an opportunity to watch. The hidden nature of their stats makes them inordinately fragile, so you're none too likely to even have the opportunity to develop a favorite before they're discarded.
The most disappointing part of the game is that there was clearly a possibility of something fun in here.
The amount of micromanagement distracts from the sexual components of the game. The solution, offered by Dungeon Keeper, would be automation; start the game by breeding goblin slaves that actively carry out the tedium of running the dungeon. Show them running around. Limit the number of "regular" slaves to a level where I at least recognize them visually, and have their rotation between facilities be something visually happening in the dungeon through character movement instead of being a race to drag and drop. A "living" dungeon would also help justify the topdown POV: as it stands, it feels more like the ultimate validation of Black-market, Monster Black-market, and other brothel management games that opt for a "dollhouse" side view that keeps the action on-screen and is convenient for dragging and dropping.
A lot of this could be mitigated by a slower pace. The time tracking and random assignment of missions gives you very little chance to enjoy what you're building. Let the player select missions instead of it being a mad dash.
All-in-all, I can't really put my stamp of approval on this. While I wish the dev all the best on future projects, particularly because I've been regularly searching "Dungeon Keeper" on this forum from my first day joining it and would love to see it done right, this first stab at realizing that concept missed both its heart and soul.