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As a long-time fan of Dungeon Keeper, watching the news about this game was something of a roller-coaster ride.
First, I heard that it was inspired by DK and DK2. Awesome!
Second, I heard that it failed to be anything like it. Sad story, that.
Third---and finally---reviews started coming in that weren't targeted solely at whether or not Dungeons = Dungeon Keeper 3. So I picked it up to give it a look-see.
The game is NOT DK3. It is, however, clearly inspired by it (which was all the developers claimed)---and it was also inspired by Diablo, Baldur's Gate, and Overlord (or other, similar games, if not those precisely).
THE GOOD
1. Basic gameplay is pretty easy to pick up, but has enough complexity that you can learn to do a lot more than just survive the level.
2. The flavor-text is funny, irreverent, and referential---the DK and Diablo series both get very strong references. Dungeons is reminiscent of the more parody-driven parts of BGII, or the entirety of Overlord in that respect.
3. Speaking of which, the gameplay has learned a lot from DK, Diablo, and BGII. The construction interface is similar (not identical) to DK's, the way your monsters and heroes fight can be compared to combat in Diablo (from which many of your skill/spell tree abilities seem inspired as well), and the quests you must fulfill for quest-giving dungeon bosses is somewhere between Diablo and Baldur's Gate style.
4. Progression of your power (and hero power) in any given dungeon is pretty well timed. Yes, the timer might seem annoying sometimes---but it is slow enough, and the power steps incremental enough, that without it I'd feel like all I had to do was plant my starting dungeon and just wait to slowly accumulate the resources I need.
THE NEUTRAL
1. I like the graphics and sound, but that may just be me.
2. At first I was overwhelmed by the menus and options, but by the third level (the first two were more or less tutorials) I felt comfortable with it.
3. The tutorial pop-ups: They provide helpful hints, but they can sometimes appear at unfortunate moments, and it took me a while to find the patience to let them sit there until I could read them, rather than clicking them away and missing something useful.
THE BAD
1. If you really wanted it to play like DK, you will be disappointed because: [NOTE: These three sub-points are things I like, but they move away from DK]
-Dungeons are often more limited. Not a lot, in truth, but there's more un-diggable granite than you'd see in DK.
-You don't directly build monster lairs, you find them---but then, in DK, you didn't directly summon the creatures. I like the way it works, but it's not the same.
-Monsters don't wander around, eat, and so on; you summon them to where you want them to stand.
-Instead of pleasing monsters, you please the heros---for example, by having a library for mages to raid.
2. The in-game cutscenes at the beginning of levels are a little annoying if you like to restart multiple times; you can click through dialogue to skip it, but the actual camera-pans still happen.
3. There are fewer tooltips that I would like, since the interface is a little more complex than I would like, but this eases into irrelevance with time.
FINAL ANALYSIS
Dungeons does what it wants to, and does it well, though not perfectly. This game is not DK, but it probably goes over to DK's house to play Overlord split-screen multiplayer, and then invites Diablo in for a D&D games-night.
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