“Spiders are coming!”
“Why are the Banshees not on the boxes?”
“Wait, the portals are opening!”
“And we need mana!”
“Why is everyone in the brewery?”
“Is this exciting, or are there just a lot of things happening at the same time?”
Dungeons 3 is a Real-Time-Strategy / City Building game that puts a spin on the tired old trope of going in a dungeon to kill the baddies and loot the treasure: this time, you are the baddie! And you do want to keep your treasure, thank you very much!
There are two theatres of war in the game: the underground and the surface.
Your home realm is in the underground, in the dark caves, where loyal minions under your control work tirelessly on digging out a complex maze system of rooms, corridors, and traps. You start by building rooms where your different types of units can sleep, they need a chicken farm to eat, training grounds to train, brewery to get drunk, etc. Each unit type has different needs, strengths, and weaknesses, you need to plan your unit composition accordingly. Sooner or later, the forces of good will notice your little operation, and start sending brave heroes. When that happens, you will need traps like spike floors, giant boulders, and trusty flamethrowers to stop them.
Before you notice it, your tiny realm consisting of some sleeping quarters and a chicken farm expands into a sprawling metropolis of evil. And in the centre of it all: your dark heart, in the form of a crystal. If the enemies destroy this so-called dungeon heart, you lose the game.
The surface is where the good guys have their bases. That is where you lead your army of darkness to conquer strategic locations, and ultimately to win the level. This is where the micro RTS style combat comes in – you can’t really control your units in the underground, other than picking them up and dropping them close to the invading heroes. On the surface, however, you can control units individually, use their special attacks, cast spells with your main hero, etc.
You move between the two worlds via tunnel entrances, but guess what – the heroes can also do that. You can count on them attacking more and more, as you spread your evilness in their world.
Dungeons 3 has a decent-sized story campaign, with a very forgettable story. You control Taliya, a recently turned good hero, who is a dark elf now. That much I remember, but not much else… More on that later. As the campaign progresses, you also gain access to more powerful stuff, stronger units, champions, more complicated rooms. A torture room. Things like that. Each level works in the same way: you gradually build up your forces, increase population cap, research weapons, spells, etc., until you feel you are strong enough, then you do a skirmish above the ground, and then you reset.
So, how would this game work in co-op, you might ask? Pretty interestingly! Players of classic 90’s strategy games might find this familiar: you both control EVERYTHING, without restrictions. Would it cause confusion and friction, you might ask? Well. Yes.
Before we start, I would like to mention that I have a strong personal angle: Dungeon Keeper 2, a game that is the godfather of all these new whippersnapper dungeon builder games these days, is one of my old favourites. A core gaming experience, if you will. I won’t go full Red Alert 3 on this review, where I scored the new game against the great ancestor, but some comparisons are inevitable.
The Good
The base building part is fun and light, if you are into that kind of stuff. (You probably know if you are…) It’s satisfying to plan ahead your core base, see how large the certain rooms should be, where the corridors should go, and in later levels, where your killzone of impenetrable traps should be set up. And then, naturally, it’s also pretty satisfying to watch heroes walk into the aforementioned killzone. The game makes you quite emotional, the enemies are really annoying, so you do start to hate them quite soon.
Units are genuinely funny and diverse. You generally need a good mix of ranged – melee – support troops, need to micro them a bit in battles. You also have to learn what the enemy troops do, and find the best way to fight against different unit compositions. It’s light and very mildly strategic, but fun.
We played Dungeons 3 on Hellish mode, and the challenge level was decent for a couple of levels.
The Bad
Based on what you read so far, you might assume that this is a light and perhaps somewhat simple game, good for some casual fun. Oh boy….
This is probably the most annoying game I have ever played. Please note that I said annoying, not bad. There are definitely far worse games out there, but this one could be the illustration for “annoying” in a dictionary. We were right at the end of our ropes, and agreed that if the game does not become more bearable in the next 30 minutes, we stop. Unlike with the worst of the worst, something kept us playing, and I’m glad we did, but boy were we right on the edge there!
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Dungeons 3‘s overall narrative displays the emotional maturity of a 10-year old boy who was raised in a cellar on nothing but chips, soda, and toxic online games. The humour is the worst type of overused referential nonsense I have ever witnessed. I am not even going to try to make fun of it, the memories are so painful. Every level starts with like five minutes of this incoherent rambling, constant 4th wall breaking, it really grinds you down fast.
Usually, I don’t feel personal hatred towards developers. Even for terrible games, I usually imagine whoever had to work on them as the suffering person. But this. Hmmmm, this game. Whoever wrote Dungeons 3, please stop writing things.
Have you ever seen a game that has an option to switch off narration? There’s literally a button for that here in the Settings! Imagine that the story and the delivery is so bad that they had to put this option in.
Not only is the humour incredibly lame and… humourless, it’s also very mean. Seriously, like the game tried to hurt my feelings. And I do like games screwing with my feelings. But you do have to earn that privilege, and Dungeons 3, you are barely passable entertainment. On the level where we got the Brewery, it just very clearly was not the right time to build it yet, so we did not. And the game started to mock us immediately. You know, on the lines like “oh, what are you, retarded I specifically told you to build the Brewery” and it was honestly really weird. I mean, do you want me to stop playing? Because I am very close…
I just wanted the game to have a face so bad, so I could finally punch it!
All right, that is the main issue with the game. If you peel away the annoying tone, what remains is a very light strategic simulation-type something.
The levels are basically the same in the underground, and you always build in a certain order. It’s kinda like a proper city-building game, but you are not really making any decisions. Every room has an optimal size. Also, you will need to build all the rooms, regardless of what unit composition you are going for, you will need at least one of most unit types. There is also not much point in overthinking where to place the rooms, your units will just walk to where they need to go anyway.
When enemies appear in your dungeon, all you can do is drop your units somewhere, and from that point, it’s autopilot.
If possible, the battles upstairs are even worse, you fight the same battles over and over again, you take out healers, then the damage-dealers, then the tanks. You need to get evilness as soon as possible, and then turtle up (if you are on harder difficulty).
By far the worst accusers from a gameplay point are the couple of levels without a dungeon. You know, when you get a number of units, and need to walk from A to B. You will have enough units to defeat enemies on the way, and you literally have no decisions to make, other than doing a not-terrible level of micro-management in the battles. These levels are terribly boring.
The unit composition, although not really important, can be fun to think about, I admit that. Should I focus on Orks, or do I do a Demon-heavy army this level, etc. However, something feels terribly wrong with the unit models. They feel like balloon animals with no weight to them, everything is very bouncy, and they push into each other constantly.
I feel like Dungeons 3 should have been much shorter. I would have much rather played a better-paced story through 10 hours than this.
Oh, and the tutorial really sucks. It’s really weird: it’s about moving your main hero’s shadows in the dark areas around light patches and avoiding the light, and then that mechanism promptly never comes up again. On the other hand, anything about dungeons, even the basics like how to pick up units or your resources, how to dig or refill, etc, are not explained at all. Not to mention even less straightforward mechanisms like how the Zombies work exactly? The in-game entries don’t explain it properly, so it’s off to googling! I mean, I don’t mind extra reading for games, but then why did we spend at least half an hour listening to the unskippable cut scenes?
The Co-Op
Co-op is really clunky, but kinda interesting. Both of you can do whatever, so you have to discuss who does what, otherwise, you will easily mess up each other’s plans. For example, you can’t really find the units in the dungeon, you pick them up with a hotkey, and it’s very easy to pick up units the other just dropped off, and that can easily mean your doom in tight situations.
We opted for one of us building in the dungeon and one of us fighting on the surface, which worked pretty well most of the time.
The Recommendation
Ehh. I am glad we finished the game, and it was a very unique experience.
However, Dungeons 3 is very hostile towards the player, very cold and distant underneath all that colourful flash animation. The narration is out-of-this-world level of annoying. It’s also kinda boring. And pointless.
So I only recommend it to “academics” of co-op games, people who want to see as many different things as possible. But not if you actually want to have fun.
Info
| Release Year | 2017 |
| Genre | City-Building, Real-Time Strategy |
| Difficulty | Medium |
| Number of Players | 1 to 2 |
| Length | 23.6 hours, but who's counting? |
Rating
| Overall | Bad |
| Story | Terrible |
| Co-Operation | Mediocre |