Impire

Impire is a dungeon keeper game set in Ardania, the setting of the Majesty series. How does Impire compared to Dungeons 3 and the old Dungeon Keeper games? Mostly poorly, which is too bad, since neither of those were all that great. Dungeon Keeper (and DK2) had promise and Dungeons 3 is mechanically solid but has poor writing and won’t shut up. Impire, by contrast, is slightly more boring mechanically while being just as bad in writing, although they don’t spend as much time on the cut scenes, at least.

In Impire, you play as Baal, a demon king summoned to help the warlock Oscar get petty revenge on everyone who wronged him. Oscar is petulant, entitled, and stupid, and on the one hand that’s a realistic depiction of typical human evil, but on the other hand it’s not super fun to be taking orders from this guy. Baal does at least threaten to skin Oscar alive any time he gets too uppity, but we still spend all our time pursuing this guy’s petty dreams of wealth, power, and lust. You do get a chance at the end to choose between Oscar and Velvet the Phantom King, an ancient ghost you release at the end of Act III (of IV) but who turns out to be good. I went Phantom King because sure, it’s pretty out-of-theme to save the world instead of conquering it, but I was beyond sick of Oscar.

It seems like this was originally supposed to be more of a thing, as a medusa queen and a noble king both make the same offer to Baal at different parts of the story, but he rejects both of them without the player choosing anything. Maybe you were originally supposed to be able to choose between four different factions, the default one for Oscar and then you’d have a chance to swap out for a new one periodically. The last act of the game has two completely different sets of cut scenes (maybe even completely different stages, I haven’t checked what Oscar’s route looks like, but the Phantom King’s route is clearly not recycling cut scenes from Oscar’s because Oscar is dead and the cut scenes feature the Phantom King heavily), so this would require more and more divergent cut scenes the more different versions of each mission there were.

Mechanically, every mission is the same, at least on normal difficulty. First you build up a dungeon, then you send your maxed out army to conquer everything. You’re almost never under any pressure to build quickly, so you can use the exact same army build every time. You have to change dungeon layout a little to deal with different underground terrain, but there’s always enough room for everything you want, so it changes very little.

It’s not unplayably bad, but I wouldn’t have finished it if I didn’t want to play the dungeon keeper genre thoroughly for academic reasons. The only game in the genre I haven’t played (that I know of – indies are hard to keep track of) is War for the Overworld and the recently released Dungeons 4. For the latter, it seems pretty similar to Dungeons 3, so I feel like I gave that series a chance and it’s the best the genre has to offer so far, but its new installment won’t fix its flaws. I don’t know how War for the Overworld will go, we’ll see if its plot is any better.