Dungeons II greatly improves upon the dungeon heart formula giving me the one thing I always most wanted out of it: The ability to ascend into the surface world to wreck the towns of the heroes up top. Mechanically, it’s competent but unexceptional except for that surface world idea, which is enough to get me through the game so long as it’s reasonably easy, which it is. If there’s one bit of design advice that’s emerged from over a year of blogging through my backlog, it’s that if your gameplay is just okay, make it easy so I don’t have to dwell on it and I’ll still probably like your game as long as it has anything else to recommend it.
Dungeons II’s writing is, unfortunately, absolutely godawful. They got the narrator from the Stanley Parable to narrate things, but they don’t have any material to give him except stale parodies of WarCraft and Game of Thrones. And WarCraft is already an RTS game. Sure, World of WarCraft had completely taken over the franchise for ten years even at Dungeon II’s 2015 release date, but it’s not like Dungeons II is drawing on WoW expansion material for its referential “humor,” it’s drawing on basic plot beats the series keeps revisiting, most of which were established in the second and third RTS games. That would be fine if those games had been single-faction Alliance games so Dungeons II would be providing a chance to play the other side, but they’re not. I could already play the other side all the way back in WarCraft I.
Then there’s Game of Thrones, and the problem there is that it’s just got fuck all to do with Dungeons II’s theme. There are no dungeons in Game of Thrones, so having the undead dungeon lord be a cross between the Night King and Arthas doesn’t really add anything to what a straight Arthas parody would’ve been bringing, and having a bunch of Game of Thrones knock-off nobles in the Alliance doesn’t go anywhere because they’re all unified against you rather than bickering amongst themselves. Digging out a bunch of Alliance NPCs from World of WarCraft would’ve been perfectly fine if all you need is a stream of ten different good guys who you need to intercept as they trickle into the map, defeating them in detail before they can mass up an unstoppably large army, and that’s a perfectly good hook for a mission mechanically. The expansion DLC is even more heavily Game of Thrones themed for some reason. As far as I can tell, the guys making Dungeons II either just really liked Game of Thrones and shoved references in out of pure fanboyism or they were hoping to cash in on its popularity without overhauling the actual content of their game at all.
And also the main antagonist is a demi-god named Krotos, which seems like a transparent reference to Kratos except that Krotos is absolutely nothing like Kratos. He’s an angelic aasimar-y sort of demi-god, and a beacon of goodness and justice who steals word-for-word Aragorn’s speech at the Black Gate in the final stage. As of Dungeons II’s release date, Kratos was a vengeful mass murdering psychopath whose character arc had been entirely about shedding redeeming qualities until he destroyed what seemed like the entire world (not until 2018 did it come out that it was actually just Greece) to satisfy his own personal grievances with Zeus and the other Olympians. My only guess is that they thought Kratos was the most badass video game protagonist around, so they used a knock-off of him for the end boss, but then wrenched every other aspect of his character out to cram him into the role their end boss actually needed to play, i.e. a leader of the armies of Good rather than an unstoppable killing machine whose motivations are understandable but wholly selfish and whose legitimate grievances are wildly out of proportion to the collateral damage he inflicts within 15 minutes of the opening credits of any given God of War game (prior to the 2018 Norse-focused game that is infuriatingly called just “God of War” even though it is a sequel).
In the end, while I like Dungeons II’s gameplay alright and there’s not a lot of competition in the dungeon heart genre, the plot is a string of references and parodies that don’t really amount to anything and which I mostly ignore in favor of listening to podcasts. It was fun, but not so fun that I wanted to bother with the DLC when it saddled me with one of those missions where you only control one unit as a mechanism for delivering a bunch of worldbuilding and exposition to set up the kinds of major confrontations you might raise an army for. Your worldbuilding and exposition are shit, Dungeons II, and I’m not going to sit through an entire thirty minute level of them just to get to more of the decently entertaining dungeon heart gameplay, nor am I remotely interested in seeing where your stupid Game of Thrones knockoff plot about the Northlands beyond the Wall might be going.
Dungeons III is at least a little bit better at this. In Dungeons III, the protagonist is Thalya, a dark elf who is your principle general in the fight against Good. She was raised by the main antagonist, a paladin named Tanos, to be all good and pure, but after you juice her up with evil magic in the tutorial, she relapses back into evil (we are told she is relapsing, but never what kind of evil she got up to in the past – sometimes it kinda seems like her original “evil” might’ve just been the original sin of being a dark elf). In dialogue, Thalya gets into arguments with herself between “Good Thalya” and “Evil Thalya.” For starters, this is an actual character, not just a reference to a character from other media with the plot and arc excised leaving a mangled name to dangle from a quest target. But also, the narrator occasionally argues with Good Thalya, and at one point drops the line “stop doing the Therese and Jeanette thing!” This line is kind of opaque to people who haven’t played Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines: Colon Cancer, but from the fact that it’s a pair you can guess what’s being referred to, and the writing for once has the restraint to just drop the reference, let the people who get it, get it, and then move on without belaboring the point.
On the other hand, in the part when Thalya is first infused with dark power, all her attacks deal either 1337 or 9001 points of damage, and instead of just letting that joke stand, they had to have Thalya shout it out, so the writing isn’t massively improved.
Dungeons III also improves the mechanics to the point of being good without any major qualification. Certainly there’s still minor nitpicks, mostly in that they’re still glued to the same basic mechanics as Dungeons II, that being where you command creatures Dungeon Keeper style while underground, picking them up and tossing them down next to what you want them to do, but WarCraft style above ground, right clicking to move or attack with the pack of units you have selected. Of course, since all your base building takes place underground, there’s nothing to do up top except unit micro, but at least you can do that unit micro with reasonable controls. The Dungeon Keeper style controls just aren’t good and it would be way better if I could just select units and order them to attack like I can on the surface. It is, at least, a marked improvement on Dungeons I, in which your dungeon minions only guarded specific rooms they were placed in and all attacks had to be accomplished exclusively with your dungeon lord, and also there was no surface level so the plot and harder levels mostly revolved around beating up other dungeon lords with surface attackers as a secondary threat.
But Dungeons II and III give you the tools to get around the irritating control scheme, and a properly laid out dungeon basically runs itself while you focus on attacking the surface. Dungeons III makes those attacks on the surface much more satisfying by being far more transparent about how you gather “evilness.” In both II and III, “evilness” is a resource gained by attacking the surface, but in Dungeons II I was never totally clear on exactly how you get it. In Dungeons III there are clearly labeled shrines of goodness and if you kill their defenders they will turn into shrines of evilness, and periodically the goodies will try to recapture them. Likewise, instead of splitting the horde, demons, and undead into three different dungeon factions like Dungeons I and II, Dungeons III makes all three of them available to you even while each of them remains playable as a completely independent faction. You can decide to play as a pure demons dungeon if you want, filling in your limited population points with nothing but imps and spider monsters, or you can go pure horde with orcs and naga, or you can mix and match and probably also add some undead at some point, I dunno, they were a DLC faction in Dungeons II and I haven’t gotten deep enough into Dungeons III to unlock them.
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