![]() Meanwhile, spell casting and research (an essential part of the genre) exists in Dungeons 2, but since most of the spells only work in your own territory, away from all the conflict that might require them, they’re rendered essentially useless. Since the dungeon is essentially a safe place all game - and since you will acquire hands-off resurrection tech for your troops - nothing stops you from just sitting for hours until you have the perfect army, then bashing through everything in the overworld. Occasionally a handful of enemy soldiers will pop in to keep you honest, but a handful of traps is usually enough to wipe them out. Because all of the significant conflicts occur in the RTS overworld, this means that a huge section of any Dungeon Keeper-like game - dungeon defense - is utterly perfunctory. Submerged Jared Petty Yet even once I learned Dungeons 2’s interface quirks, I found that its two-mode structure prevents its stronger management game from being any fun. That was simply the most egregious example - far too much of my time was spent trying to figure out how to navigate three or more levels of maps, or why, despite clicking the “attack” button that appeared over an enemy trap, my troops were simply standing there and letting it kill them. That would get the narrator off my back… half an hour later. It turned out that by “train,” Dungeons 2 meant a much more specific use of the Arena: I had to drop the unit onto the pit, then click on the Arena and select a unit upgrade. He or she would sit there, whack the training dummy for a while, gaining experience.and the narrator would continue to tell me I needed to train units. I did this, and consistently dropped my units on the new fighting pit. For example, on one campaign map, you have a mission to build an arena and train a unit with it. It tells you what you need to do (often, and annoyingly, during the campaign) but rarely how you might go about doing it using the confusing interface. Obfuscation of important information, or poor explanation, is a consistent problem throughout Dungeons 2. There are hotkeys for the special skills, it turns out, but Dungeons 2 never makes this clear. A few units have skills, like upgraded orcs who can buff nearby units with a Battle Cry, But you’ll have to wrestle with the interface to get to them. ![]() Things like attack-while-moving, or formations? Not present. ![]() Nor is there’s a significant tactical component. ![]() There’s no major strategic element-you just find enemies and smash them. And it feels like playing Warcraft.the first one, from 1994. When you’ve got a decent little army, you send them above the ground, where it’s a conventional real-time strategy game in the Warcraft vein: direct control over troops, right-click to move and attack, and so on. As a personification of Ultimate Evil, you’re playing a Dungeon Keeper-like strategy game belowground - indirectly controlling your creatures to build rooms for efficiency, sending little imps out to find caves and gold, managing entertainment for bored creatures -all this stuff works. The central idea of Dungeons 2 is a good one. In theory, this is idea was clever! Moving into the endgame of a Dungeon Keeper-like management game has never been satisfying, so replacing it with an RTS battle might’ve been a good payoff-thematically appropriate too, as it connects the idea of an underground evil corrupting a totally different surface. ![]()
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