Dungeon Keeper-

Supposedly the most anticipated game of the year, Dungeon Keeper is in fact one of the longest awaited games for the PC ever. Approximately two years after the original release date the game finally shipped.

Fortunately I could have cared less about when Dungeon Keeper was coming out. I had never heard of it until a month before its release. I was not forced to sit in nail biting suspense every time the revised release date was approaching, and I never faced dissapointment when the game failed to show at the last moment. In other words, my expectations of the game were never raised to the heights that those of some were.

Dungeon Keeper is unique in that you get to be the bad guy. You are an evil dungeon keeper (Or, to those of us with an AD&D history, Dungeon Master) and you get to design your dungeon and populate it with monsters. This is, I grant you, a unique premise for a game, but it is not enough to go and drop $50 to buy the game. No, Dungeon Keeper earns its pay through different means. It is the less advertised features that make the game really shine.

The first thing that will strike you after five minutes of play is the presentation. The graphics are good, the controls are intuitive, and the scrolling, rotating, and multiple and movable light sources are a dream! The game feels as if it is set up on a lazy susan, and that you can whirl it around to look at it from any angle. The zoom control is fantastic, allowing you to go in or out without dealing with integral zooming like 1X, 2X, 3X, etc. You go in just as or out just as far as you want.

The second part of the game that I really like are the personalities of the creatures. Every creature has a sort of preprogrammed disposition, and will do what it wants to. If you try to get a creature to exercise, study, or whatever, you may find yourself in a battle of wills to convince them to do so. Sometimes the creature will behave for all of 20 seconds until you race off to deal with another issue, and you end up finding that they are up to it again.

An example of this misbehaving is the "relationship" between vampires and warlocks. Even if you make seperate "bedrooms" and "kitchens" for each of them, they will eventually find and begin to kill each other. Now I know how my mother felt with dealing with me and my sisters!

Another neat feature is that you can jump into any creature at any time, taking direct control of their actions. If someone has an important mission to do and it is impossible to explain to them what you want them to do, just "possess" them and do it yourself. The style of play jumps from a third person to first person, much like Doom, but the graphics are a little weak. Still, what Doom style game allows you to build a map and instantly take over any of the creatures in the game?

I have read many reviews criticising the AI, saying that it makes decisions based totally on thresh holds passed by the player. Dig beyond a certain point, get a full frontal assault from the computer. Never cross that point, never get attacked.

While it is true that the game does wait for these cues from the player, I see no better way for many of the missions to be played any different. Unless the computer waits for the player to do something, or waits until a certain time, he could come storming into a brand new dungeon with his level 10 heroes and smash everything before you got off to a safe start. Bullfrog was criticised for making Gene Wars too difficult, while they are now receiving criticism for having gone too far the other way. I guess you just can't please all the people all the time. So what is my verdict? I would have to say this game is a definite winner assuming that you weren't expecting the game of the year. It is a cross between Sim City, Populous, and Doom, taking the best of each.