DEEPER DUNGEONS is an add-on pack for the Electronic Arts game Dungeon Keeper that came out last year. Dungeon Keeper, Bullfrog, puts you in the novel position of being the evil boss in charge of a scurrilous crew of monsters in a dank pit.
Starting off with a Dungeon Heart (the centre of your power), you order your lowly Imp minions to mine gold, and then start building rooms. A Portal, through which monsters arrive, is very important, as are lairs (for sleeping), and the hatchery, where the monsters eat the growing chickens.
As you progress through the levels, laying waste to the lands above, new creatures, spells, and rooms became available. After a while you can build sprawling dungeons, which are home to monsters such as the Warlock (great for researching new spells, and zapping enemies with firebolts), Bile Demons (useful for making new Doors and Traps in the Workshop), and Dark Mistresses (rulers of the dreaded Torture Chamber).
Apart from the rooms listed above, you can build cemeteries, prisons, bridges, treasure rooms, guard houses, scavenger rooms, libraries, and more. Different rooms attract particular monsters, and the monsters perform their various duties in the rooms, interspersed with sleeping and eating.
As the Dungeon Keeper, you can cast mighty spells to help your monsters along. One fun spell is possession, with which you take control of the monster. It’s neat to zoom along as a fly, looking at the world through multi-faceted eyes. Useful for scouting out the enemy’s position too.
Most of the levels have an enemy that you have to defeat to progress on to the next land. These enemies may be heroic knights, warriors, wizards, and so on, or perhaps a rival Dungeon Keeper, who has a motley crew of monsters bent on your destruction.
Sadly, all good things come to an end, and once you’ve finished the levels of Dungeon Keeper, there isn’t a lot of point in replaying them. The maps never change, you get the same spells, rooms, and monsters at roughly the same time, and it all gets a bit boring.
This is where the Deeper Dungeons could have been great. If it had included new monsters, new spells, new rooms, new cutscenes, and a scenario and map editor it would have been a brilliant add-on pack. Unfortunately all Deeper Dungeons has to offer is more of the same.
Fifteen new solo play maps, and 15 new multi-player maps are about it. The solo maps aren’t even linked in a story as in the original. The artificial intelligence of the monsters and enemies has improved, and the graphics are somewhat better (you still need to download the newest Direct3D patch off the Internet though), but it really isn’t enough.
Deeper Dungeons requires the original game to be loaded on to your hard-drive. It needs a Pentium 75, 16 megabytes of Ram, and quad-speed CD-Rom drive. The Dos version only needs a 486DX4-100. It recommends a Pentium 133 and SVGA graphics card. You can play multi-player over network or direct cable.
The new levels include some really hard maps and enemies, and I still haven’t managed to win through most of them yet, but without the story and new goodies to play with, Deeper Dungeons just doesn’t keep the interest up.
Bullfrog, Dungeon Keeper: The Deeper Dungeons retails for $99 incl gst.
Fingers crossed the next add-on pack will do the job properly.
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