Dungeons is allegedly a Dungeon Heart strategy game in the mold of Dungeon Keeper: You build a dungeon and repel attacking heroes, inverting the usual Diablo-style dungeon crawling action RPG. It’s really clear that what they actually wanted to make was a regular ARPG, though. The main plot is about descending down through three different tilesets of dungeons and confronting three dungeon bosses. It’s full of references to almost entirely Blizzard RPGs like Diablo and World of WarCraft (although in fairness Arthas was also a character in WarCraft III, an RTS), bringing up Dungeon Keeper only to explain how Dungeons works differently.
So how does Dungeons work differently? Well, your dungeon lord is at least 50% of your influence over the map. Monsters don’t venture far from the pentagrams used to summon them, and you can’t move those pentagrams after placing them. The pentagrams do expand your area of influence, so you use pentagrams to push out the borders of your control. You can’t tunnel very far past your area of influence, so pushing borders like this is, to some extent, important.
Dungeons’ big change from Dungeon Keeper is that your primary resource is now soul energy. Heroes come into your dungeon with zero soul energy, but as they fulfill needs like treasure, defeating monsters, finding equipment, or finding knowledge, they fill up soul energy. Once they’re maxed out, they’ll try to leave. You get a chunk of their soul energy when you defeat them and can get more by imprisoning them in a dungeon to slowly extract the rest.
Regular old gold mined out from veins in your underground lair is still used to place minion-spawning pentagrams, but every other function of gold is in helping you extract soul energy, either by placing loot or libraries or armories or other things that give heroes soul energy or else dungeons that help you extract it from defeated heroes. Soul energy is the currency you use to increase your dungeon level and place prestige items. The former makes all your minions stronger while the latter makes your dungeon lord stronger.
Your dungeon lord is the only unit you can move around with regular right clicks. Since all of your other units are tied to pentagrams which must be placed within your area of influence, your dungeon lord is the only one who can venture into enemy dungeon lords’ territory and is the only unit you can use for various scenario-specific objectives to do with ruining the heroes’ day, like intercepting a thieves’ guild smuggling cash through the underground or wrecking the cellars of various townsfolk (which spawns heroes in response). Your dungeon lord has an ability tree retained throughout the campaign, and while some of the abilities on that tree increase the power of your defensive minions, most of them increase the power of your dungeon lord either passively or through spells you can equip to your hotbar.
Additionally, at the end of each of the game’s three acts (not explicitly defined as such, but there’s three major antagonists in three different dungeon tilesets confronted in sequence), you must send your dungeon lord to fight the enemy boss alone. The more you’ve invested your skill points into dungeon management, the less effective you’ll be in these boss fights where your dungeon lord is the only usable unit.
What it all adds up to is an ARPG with a dungeon heart backdrop that mainly serves to distract from the ARPG elements. The strength of your character is pretty directly tied to the prestige items you can build for your dungeon, but those are bought with soul energy, and the system for accumulating soul energy involves a lot of babysitting heroes into taking a bunch of gold before dropping your dungeon lord on them (who is, remember, the only mobile unit, even in sections of the dungeon under your control), then waiting for more heroes to show up. The rate at which soul energy comes in is pathetic compared to how much you need to buy big-ticket prestige items that can significantly increase your power (or dozens of smaller ones that add up to the same cost for slightly lesser effect).
Focusing the dungeon management on being half dungeon lord and half game master made the dungeon heart gameplay less fun than games which focus purely on defeating heroes, and the rate at which heroes come in is far too slow when they’re the only source of the game’s most vital resource, and all of your offensive actions (which are the conclusion to basically every scenario – less than a quarter of the game’s sixteen stages are defensive) are carried out by playing the action RPG that they clearly wanted to be making instead.
The game also performs poorly on my machine, and while I normally chalk this up to my weird powerful processor + weak graphics card combo caused by the pressure crypto has been putting on the graphics card market, Dungeons is a 2011 game, so this seems like it’s more likely the thing where games from the 2010-2012-ish era run worse than games both before and after and upgrading the machine doesn’t help.
I took a quick look at the next game in the series and it does look like you can actually move your units plus you can venture forth to the surface world instead of always wrecking people’s cellars, so I’m not taking Dungeons II and III out of the backlog, but they’re definitely on notice to actually work, both in terms of performance and gameplay.
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