It’s often that I’ll play random games and discover that I like them or hate them. It’s quite another experience to play a game that brings the question of “why does this exist?” Keeplanet is more of a game that confuses me more than anything else. I don’t hate it and I certainly don’t like it, but mostly I just don’t “get” it. There’s some sort of design philosophy to this title, but the end goal didn’t seem to be “fun.”
Keeplanet‘s concept rides on the principal of “balance.” You are the “World Commander” of a set of planets in a solar system, your role being to develop the new home for humanity after Earth got blowed up. Your goal is develop your world by placing objects on the outer rim of the planet and keep the balance of all of the objects such that the world keeps spinning and isn’t dragged down by being too heavy on one side. You can balance the world on the fly by placing more objects down and hoping you are “calculating” correctly before your world’s inhabitants are killed off from the lack of rotation. Gravity seems to have taken a vacation from the rules of physics, but there’s stranger things happening in quantum mechanics so anything is possible, I suppose.
There’s nothing that’s inherently fun about the concept of randomly placing objects on the extreme edges of a planet, though. Not only is it a pain to actually see where you’re placing things, but the planet will get “bigger” as more objects are placed and you put down even more objects between those objects. Some levels require putting down a hundred or more of these “objects” so you’ll really have to be paying attention to what the hell is going on. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t really provide you with the tools or information to help you in this manner. There is a weight scale that defines the weight of the planet’s “left” and “right” (whatever that means) and as the world rotates on its axis and more objects are built, these numbers change constantly. The goal is to keep these numbers as balanced as possible and the world will rotate. If it stops rotating, then your population will start dying out from heat and cold and once it reaches zero, it’s game over.
The user interface leaves a lot to be desired. There’s a large “Play” button on the menu screen that you only use one time, but stays there after you click it. Selecting your level beckons you to click a WORD that says “Play” not the big Play button that becomes a quick way to close the entire menu and put you back to the Title Screen. Like, why the hell do I need to go back to the Title Screen at that point? Just hide the Play button or use it as the level selection.
The information provided regarding objects is basically nonsensical and I just don’t care about the numbers when I have to plop down 300 objects quickly — otherwise I’d be here for 30 minutes for one of these levels and that ain’t happening. Of course, I die over and over regardless, so I’m stuck playing that long anyway! I also really don’t get why the outer edges of the planet are the only thing being used; when the planet becomes bigger it becomes impossible to see all parts of the planet without zooming out, which makes the objects you are placing much smaller. Where’s the joy in placing some stupid ass mountain on a planet if I can’t see it???? Or those dumb trees, for that matter. There’s no agency here where I can pick which objects I want to place and create a strategy to overcome the task at hand — it’s more of a Tetris with objects being served to you and you dealing with it. So, some World Commander you are. Who is building these unwanted mountains for you? Why not some big speakers that play Spanish music to liven up the place? There’s also a big wasted space in the center of the planet which I feel could have been used for the user interface information in a more creative way, but instead the UI elements get in the way of the game play, and you mostly just stare at blank space on your screen. The graphics are generally inoffensive, otherwise. The sound isn’t that annoying, but there’s a siren that will go off when your population is dying, which can be a bit annoying.
The only real positive aspect of this game is that it is really cheap. It is currently $1.99 on Steam at full price, so you can probably get it with some Steam balance and check it out if it interests you. There are probably about twenty levels including the “Challenges.” It’s not particularly impressive, but it works and you can play it.
I don’t really understand why the title of the game is “Keeplanet,” but it probably goes along with the translation errors that can be picked out in the text. Maybe it’s as simple as “Keep your planet alive. Keep. Planet. Keeplanet.” ::facepalm::
When it comes to the store’s page, it’s almost comical how weirdly it is worded at points. Two quotes from the Store page and my analysis:
Develop the planet In Keeplanet, you create your own history – there’s no right or wrong way to play! Become a world’s landlord, spread out trees, mountains, houses and other objects to make the planet rotate around its axis. Remember, the most important thing is not to let the planet stop. Otherwise, all inhabitants of the planet will die out from sunburn or freezing.
Except there is a right or wrong way to play. You get game overs when you don’t play the right way! It says it right in the same paragraph that if you let the planet stop you lose, that’s the definition of having a wrong way to play!
Fight for the humanity Universe is a dangerous place, protect people from external hazards – meteorites, meteor rains and vigilant aliens are waiting for your mistakes. Don’t let them break you!
Fighting for “the” humanity = fighting for our morals?
External hazards from outside of the universe?
The vigilant aliens just ram your planet, similar to meteors. Meteorites are also meteors that have hit the Earth, so are meteors that hit Earth, flying off of Earth across the universe and then hitting your new planet? What a bunch of assholes.
The same sort of thing happens with the in-game text, but there isn’t nearly as much writing, so there’s less to fuck up. Some of the English is so broken, they are just words on screen with no association to each other.
Happy Founder’s Day everyone! It has been 22 years since anyone last cared about it, but TODAY is the day we do!
Today we have Unnamedhero joining us on the show.
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We talk about the Angry Birds movie trailer a bit, which leads to a discussion about reality shows, somehow.
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The Pope is in town and we talk about that a little bit. I don’t care about religion that much, so here’s some picture.
Oh, Pope Francis! You so great!
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Twenty Eleven or Two thousand and eleven? We spend like 10 minutes talking about how to say numbers.
We skip to John Boehner and talk about how big of a cry baby he is.
I’m gonna miss one thing about Mr. Boner. Well, two.
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We go into the Republican debates/controversies a bit. I bring up my Twitter interactions with random crazy conservatives who are outraged over renamed mountains and clocks.
We also announce the new Apple clothing store, iRack. Only black shirts. Then somehow Billy knows random actors who wear all black.
We go over some presidential predictions, and then go into some Fall TV talk. Gotham is back. This leads into a bigger discussion about plotlines and story in comic book TV shows and movies. James Bond stuff comes up. Billy saw the new Fantastic Four. We talk about it.
We go over super heroes and what their party affiliations would probably be. The consensus may surprise you on some of the famous heroes!
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That’s it for today! Hopefully the next episode isn’t too far away…
Developer/Publisher: OM Entertainment || Overall: 1/10
Hardware Used: Windows 8.1, i7, Nvidia GTX 780
When it comes to reviewing bad games, it’s always a hard decision to make. Do I make a tongue-in-cheek positive review, or perhaps a sharply sarcastic review full of jokes, or just a traditional opinion about the hopes and dreams that “Chariot Wars” completely and utterly destroyed? For this review I’m not quite sure what direction to go, because Chariot Wars just leaves me confused and maybe even a little sad when reflecting upon my time playing.
Considering the game is originally developed for mobile phones, the basic features are limited. You have only three modes of play to choose from: Multiplayer, Single Player Time Trial, and Single Player Story Mode, called Championship. Multiplayer requires you to register an account with the developer’s web site rather than using Steam. Single Player Time Trial is racing around one of the four possible unique tracks, alone, with no A.I. to race against. Each track has two variations: Night and Day – all of which are unlocked only through the Championship Mode. Time Trial is consistently pointed to by the “Game Tips” and even prompted as a gate before you enter the real “meat” of the game, which is the Championship Mode.
Here’s where things get… “interesting.” Chariot Wars’ Championship mode is a graphic novel murder mystery story with boring gameplay in between chapters. The story is by far the only redeeming factor this game has to offer and is actually quite hilarious and dark, in a campy way. The backdrop of Ancient Rome is used as the Captain of the Guard is called to investigate a double murder – one man crucified and a woman with her throat slit, holding a tattered symbol of the Cabal, which is a group of conspirators who assassinated Julius Caesar. The murdered man is related to Ben-Hur (we finally have our sequel to Ben-Hur, ya’ll!) and before researching much of anything about the murder, the current idiot Caesar thinks it would be a good idea for the lead investigator of a murder to stop doing that and to instead replace the dead guy in the chariot race — and that’s when you take control of your chariot and race.
After winning the race, Quintus Octavian, the protagonist of the story makes out with a hot chick with a very large rack in some random room and then with her help figures out what the symbol is from, and so on. I don’t necessarily want to explain every facet of the story here, but you are rewarded for your effort of winning races with these story interludes. It may take a few tries depending on how well you know the track and if you can catch up to the computer players, but you’ll eventually win each race… hopefully. Besides, you don’t have much else to do.
The gameplay itself is very standard in its rules – just get first place and win after two laps. For some odd reason there are huge floating coins that give you temporary speed boosts that don’t really make you feel like you’re going faster. When using a speed boost, everything becomes blurry and it feels like you’re all of a sudden in a Michael Bay movie, not knowing what the hell is going on. Considering the boosts are supposed to be good, they sure as hell don’t make you want to use them other than hopefully never having to play through that race again. Wonky physics, bad collision, weird animation, and the lack of any “warring” with other players (though you can bump into them) just isn’t fun. The scenery is also very strange, considering chariot races were always in a coliseum. There are snow-covered mountains surrounding you everywhere (and curving with the sky, which is fucking weird), waterfalls, random mixed species of trees, a blinding light source as bright as a sun coming out of a mountain (while it rains), and other oddities. This alternate dimension doesn’t seem like a very nice place to spectate or even race, not that the game is meant to be an accurate representation of anything.
And that’s kind of the game. The music is generic and there is a strange chime that rings every time you click one of the menu buttons. There are a lot of weird translation things going on, which adds a certain “charm” to the game, and the incessant badgering to go to the Time Trial mode to learn how to play is almost hilarious since you can’t play any new tracks unless you unlock them through Championship Mode, which you only do by beating the track! The races get harder as you go on, but you have to wonder how the difficulty is really ramping up when your chariot likes to all of a sudden go out of control a lot more often on turns as you progress. At least the game didn’t crash while I was playing it. You can also make funny things happen when you boost into one of the invisible walls on the race track. If you ever get stuck in the scenery of the game, the only solution is to restart the track from scratch.
You can choose from several racers, chariot colors, and horses (all of which you have to unlock through play) which may or may not have an influence on your racer – it is sort of hard to tell. Another point of contention is that it’s $25 on Steam. Considering the amount of content the game has to offer, you have to wonder what the hell is going on.
And so there’s not a whole lot to keep you going. Other than the graphic novel portions and the strangely long CG video that displays a full length chariot race (presumably what you’d be “experiencing” while playing) full of random characters you probably don’t even play, you aren’t going to want to touch this game.
“Reset” restarts the whole track.
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A reviewable copy of Chariot Wars was provided to Squackle.
I wrote this as a “thank you” note to Scott, who was a Naturalist at a school camp I was forced to go to in 6th grade.
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March 16, 1998
Dear Scott,
My name is davepoobond, and I was in your group (duh, I wouldn’t be writing to you then). My favorite activities were eating and sleeping.
One special thing I learned was to never ever climb up a mountain more than 3 inches tall. I learned this from OUCHY-OUCHY Mountain and going up the “Check This Out” trail. It should’ve had a big sign that said, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE!!!!!” and it should’ve been called, “ The Freaky Trail from HECK!!!!!”
3.5 million years ago, Don Johanson, Darwin, Ethiopia, a long mountain range in Africa died naturally, sank into a lake, flesh rotting away, sand and gravel covered the bones, each sand grain turned it into rock they can map out a world different than now was wet and forested the knee joint he was able to tell what kinds of bones it looked like not being able to lock the ash over 3 million years old Lucy 3.5 ft hair they walked upright less bushes, more trees its thought it wasn’t at first 1992 3.5 million small porcupines bring bones in they eat in the trees hunted 18 million you can make a rock sharp tool maker 4 ft. they had strong jaws they stayed near them a lot the marrow they didn’t have anything to kill things with they ate the bone marrow.
Blood, behavior, walking behavior, jaw, mooses 100,000 years ago deep eye sockets high forehead, chins Europe cold meat 300,000 years short and stocky all the humans went through there because it was safe better strategic ability middle east spears drawings on the caves by chewing charcoal and spitting by building watercraft flint a harp.
There once was a bear named Max. He was a hopeless romantic who spent his days smelling flowers and eating bark off of trees for the cleanliness of his teeth. He would always try to find the perfect flower to give to one of his many potential mates.
Natasha the Big Brown Bear was the skankiest bear in all of The NeighborWood, also known as “The Wood.” She would climb trees and then eat the acorns out of their shells and then spit them at other bears. She was so annoying. This one time she spat an acorn shell on the mayor of The Wood, Mayor Hunstingson. She was kicked out of the city for three days and had to direct traffic from the neighboring city ForesTown to and fro. Traffic duty is pretty much the worst duty you could do in The Wood since everyone is an idiot and doesn’t know how to drive their cars.
Max found a Red Mistberry Flower growing in a ravine north of the NeighborWood Nuclear Factory. He thought it smelled so good that he picked it and decided to give it to Natasha as a gesture of affection. He thought since Natasha would be all alone on the Bearway Pass between NeighborWood and ForesTown, he could make his move.
It was an unfortunate misplacing of romantic intentions for Max. Natasha had the IQ of a baboon, and the brain of one, too. That’s why she’s so stupid. Because she isn’t a bear, she is a baboon in the body of a bear. Too bad for Max because she had a booty like DANGGGG!!!!! Natasha ate his Red Mistberry Flower and spat the seeds at him when he presented it to her.
All spat on, heartbroken, and no one to love, Max went back to his den made out of bricks. It was a nice den, but watch out if he wanted to fart because IT’S MADE OF BRICKS!!!!! You may not get it, but sure.
The next week, Max found a flower called the Junior Talap Wishmaker. It was the perfect type of flower to give to Allison the Green Bear. Why was she green? Because she is soooooo cool. That’s why! She’s like one of those chicks you see on BizarroBook who is friends with someone you know but sticks out like a sore thumb in their friends list. So, Allison the Green Bear was at the local record store Bear-cords, smelling the guitar tablature books. She liked the very minor temporary high the glue gave her. Max came in, holding the large flower between his teeth, trotting down the aisle in a triumphant fashion. Allison looked over to see Max presenting her with the flower. She smelled it, but it did not give her even the slightest amusement. Her swollen red eyes watered as the flowers pungent smell filled her sinuses. She stood up on two legs and sneezed right onto Max’s face. Max dropped the flower in astonishment and suddenly he was teleported back to his brick den. The Junior Talap Wishmaker would grant one wish to anyone who sneezed on the face of the person that had picked (aka murdered) the flower. In this case, Allison wished for Max to go away.
For two weeks, Max was again depressed and lacking in the macking. He searched high and low for the next flower that would really impress his new love, Calista the Model Bear. Calista spent most of her days at the NeighborWood Hidden Lake Resort, poolside, tanning in the moonlight. The moonlight tanning fad had become a mandated regiment by the bear modeling agency known as Bear-It-All, and was forcing all of their famous bear models to take part in the tanning procedure which consisted of placing a huge amplification telescope above the tanner and focus the beam onto them until they became glowing with moon radiation.
Max was able to catch a spaceship to the Moon and picked a Moonflower for Calista since she seemed to like the Moon and he thought if he got this rare and special Moonflower which you could be arrested for if you picked it because there’s only like three of them left, so it makes it even MORE romantic because he committed a crime to show his love and chicks fall over for that stuff like a domino in a hurricane.
Max was seen by the Moonflower Security Response Team and for the next three days he was in the middle of a Western-Sci-Fi-style laser gunfight and spaceship dogfight campaign to get the flower back to the Earth. Needless to say, and really the point I’m trying to make, is that Max did a lot to get this flower and it was a lot of effort.
After killing 67 members of the security team, they finally let him go. Max gained the nickname the Moonflower Assassin for his cunning flower picking skills and being able to elude all of the security around the illustrious Moonflower.
Max , dressed in his space fighter leather jacket, with 67 tally marks on his right shoulder and “Moonflower Assassin” written in capital letters across his back, journeyed up the mountain to the Hidden Lake Resort. Standing on two legs, he presented the Moonflower to Calista.
“Ugh, what is that? I don’t even LIKE flowers… harrumph!” Calista put the cucumbers back on her eyes and began to ignore Max again.
Max fell backward and the Moonflower, encased in its little forcefield blasted off towards the moon, to return to its nest.
Later next week, Max was escorted to the Emergency Sex Change Room. He had absolutely no luck with women so he decided he wanted to try being one so that he could learn how to make one like him.
He hated flowers forever.
The end.
Moral of the story: If you only have two minutes to think up a moral to explain your story, you’re doing it wrong.
Someone had shared the post with their friend “Ron” and he had sent this back as a response to me…
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From: Ron
Subject: Re: [Shared Post] Knights of Mayhem (TV Show) Review
I’m willing to bet that the guy that wrote this is a un-muscled, non-competative type that has never risked anything other than his opinion, his verbal diaria, or his know-it-all attitude all his life. So men who climb mountains, run rapids, play footbal for free, jump horses, ride in Rodio’s must all be
losers in this guys book. Guess we must add hockey players to the mix. Some men love challenge. If I was still the man I used to be, I’d jump at the chance to do this, just to be able to sit at a table with the kind of men that have the kind of balls to try and do it. That’s whats clearly missing
in the man that wrote the critique. Ron
Developer/Publisher: Night Owl Games || Overall: 8/10
If you ever thought of opening up your own dungeon in the pits of Hell (or maybe just your local uninhabited doomy-looking mountain overlooking villages to rape and pillage), Dungeon Overlord is your game.
Screw that Farmville crap. It’s time to make some dungeons full of farms! And sleeping areas for the illegals– I mean Goblin workers — and slave chambers for the wise Warlocks writing your scrolls of knowledge to research random things you didn’t think you need to use. I can’t wait until I’m able to spend 20 million research tokens to get mastery over dragons — but I guess I’m getting ahead of myself since that’s about a year out.
So, instead of jumping ahead into the future, let’s start at the beginning. It starts with a very strict tutorial. Strict in the sense that if you don’t follow it, you will royally screw yourself, at least when you are starting to get into the game. It is very strict during that whole phase, despite the fact you can “do other things” while doing the tutorial phase. It can take a lot longer than you may be accustomed to actually “start a game” since you can end up screwing yourself if you are too impatient and look ahead to what quests you can do later on. If you don’t do exactly what the game tells you for the first hours of the game, you essentially can become stuck unless you want to wait a day to get enough resources back to fix your “errors.” You don’t go to the Overworld until you are level 10, which pretty much means the tutorial lasts until then.
Speaking of waiting, that is what most of the game is. Everything happens in real-time and things literally take hours to accomplish. Two hours here, two hours there, things add up. This game was obviously made for people who can log in maybe once or twice a day, so if you’re expecting some sort of traditional game that you can consistently play for more than an hour in one sitting, you’re not getting it. Dungeon Overlord is by no means the only game that propagates this style of gameplay, and if you’re a traditional gamer like I am, it can be sort of annoying having to come back and only being able to do about 5 minutes of playing at any given time. The responsibilities you gain ramp up as you expand, so it feels like there’s more for you to do in any one visit to the game later on.
There are a ton of resources to gain. The list of resources I could find are:
Food, Gold, Research, Experience, Leather, Iron, Crystal, Abyssal Mantle, Adamantite Ore, Deep Ochre, Dense Basalt, Diamond, Feldspar, Heart of the Earth, Mithril Ore, Moonstone, Primordial Earth, Primordial Fire, Primordial Ice, Primordial Water, Quicksilver, Ruby, Shallow Mantle, Adamantite Ingot, Ashen Stone, Cold Iron Ingot, Crystite, Dense Iron Ingot, Goblin Twine, Mana Spark, Mithril Ingot, Reinforced Leather, True Silver Ingot, Prismatic Glass, Whirling Gizmos, Steel Ingot, Explosive Grog, and maybe more?
Why are there so many resources? I don’t know. What basis of the decision is there behind adding more resources? I’m not exactly sure, but each different room requires some of these unique resources to upgrade. Crafted Resources (included in the list) are more complex, because they are made by combining basic resources. It also seems like they can just add more whenever they want, but it’s not like they’d announce that kind of stuff as far as I can see. I don’t even know how I collect half the resources I DO have in my storage spaces right now. I also don’t know what benefit diamonds have over rubies or pig iron other than making cars is better with diamonds. In fact, there are so many resources, it could be kind of confusing trying to figure out why you have them in the first place. I don’t exactly understand how experience is earned other than quests, but I seem to get it anyway, much like other resources I randomly have or get. You get experience just from upgrading your rooms, apparently, even though that isn’t too plainly spelled out for you in-game. I’m about a week or two into the game, and the overall point of gold is to seemingly pay off your servants for the handjobs they give you. You can have as much as you want without any limits to it, and the only way to spend it on any resources you DO need, like Iron or Crystal, is via a hidden menu item in the Overworld where you can buy resources people post for sale. Once you’re able to get to a second dungeon, it increases your resource acquisition by a bit as well.
When you expand to your other dungeons, they work independently of your original one, and you have to ship goods to and from the new dungeon, such as workers, resources, and furniture. It is easy to run out of space in your starter dungeon, so you do need to expand to get more tiles. But of course, you can buy more tiles for your home dungeon!
Games like Dungeon Overlord are free to play, but they thrive on arbitrarily creating quality of life issues, such as waiting three hours for an upgrade, so that you can pay with Facebook Credits to temporarily alleviate any concerns you may have while playing. This game isn’t SO bad in this regard, as you can definitely get by without spending one red cent, but there are many many “opportunities” built into the game to spend your Dungeon Marks (which are the in-game currency converted from Facebook Credits). Using any of these boosts or upgrades gives you a huge advantage over players that do not use the same boosts, and that is probably the point. To me, it seems like the only “useful” upgrades are permanent ones. Paying money for temporary boosts and fast upgrades is not cost effective at all, and you’ll end up spending a lot of money without realizing it, not to mention forgetting to or not being able to fully use the capabilities of those boosts at all times.
The things you actually pay for are things like resource boosts, upgrade completions (at different rates, as well), more tiles to build stuff on, immunity from raids, other stuff like that. You’re not going to find much that is useful below 5 marks, and most of the upgrades and boosts are time-based and temporary, or only apply to the current dungeon you are in, allowing you to purchase those same permanent increases in your other dungeons as well. The current conversion of Facebook Credits is 20 for $1.99. That comes out to about 10 cents per credit, but you get an extra 10-15% extra dungeon marks depending on how much you redeem in-game.
The User Interface is okay, but it can be sort of lacking in regards to trying to figure out how many Dungeon Marks you have — scratch that. While I was playing, they upgraded the game to plainly show how many Dungeon Marks you have, not to mention another handy “buy” button to refill up your marks. As a reviewer playing this game, I got 300 marks to play around with, and I easily spent 105 while being super conservative. Anywho, back to the user interface, the miscellaneous amount of information that you might want to look up are in places you probably wouldn’t intuitively think they should be in, but if you click around enough you eventually do find what you need. There is also a huge “invite friend” toolbar at the bottom that takes up a huge amount of your screen, which I do not like. They might as well make that toolbar an “announce you are an idiot” toolbar, cause I ain’t using it either way.
The Overworld is an interesting place, as each player resides in their own mountain, along with four other players. Each player is able to potentially expand into the rest of the mountain, and if you wanted to, attack your neighbor’s dungeons as well. There is quite a lot of real estate available in each mountain, and depending on how active your neighbors are, you might even have the whole thing to yourself. Raiding is just another way to gain resources, and can only be done in the Overworld screen. The raids on other dungeons and towns are passive (meaning all you need to do is wait for it to happen and then it does), and they usually require a certain amount of minions. You use orcs to raid, initially, and eventually use other units such as Thieves, Warlocks, Dark Elves, etc etc etc. Once a battle is over, you can “watch” the battle as it happened, but it is basically just your minions going in and moving very slowly until they find something to whack and then I guess the goal of your minions is to get to the vault, steal gold and other resources, and then leave. There is no destruction of any rooms or anything like that. Raiding is useful because some resources are only gained by raiding, such as leather. The world map actually has many different zones and other villages around your mountain.
For some reason, the keyboard does not work when you are in full screen mode. Don’t ask me why, but that’s annoying when you’re trying to rename something into your favorite rapper. When you start out the game, annoying “share” pop-ups appear every other quest, which takes you out of the game so you can tell your friends how much fun you’re having placing a jewel box in your vault. It tapers off after the Tutorial quests complete, but occasionally you still see them. I can understand that they want you to share with your friends, but it really breaks up the experience by tossing you out of the game (especially if you’re in full screen mode) to do so. It should be integrated into the game, if anything. In fact, the invite friend bar should be used for this purpose. I’d actually prefer that this didn’t happen at all, but thems the bricks, I suppose. The constant badgering of telling you to share stuff with your friends is almost a game breaker for me, and I probably would have stopped playing if it weren’t for the fact that I was going to write something about it.
There is a lot of noise pollution created by this game. Sound effects are constantly going, and doesn’t seem to have had much design intent involved as to when you hear most of the sounds going on. They are just on an endless loop. There is music, which you can mute independently. You can also mute everything, but there is no way to mute ONLY sound effects if you felt like you wanted to listen to the music in the game. I guess I should be thankful that the game remembers you keep the sound on mute.
The graphics in the game are reminiscent of Roller Coaster Tycoon, a game about ten years old. It’s not exactly something I missed, but I guess its nice to see that quality of art again in a new game. It has a sense of humor, which is nice, as well, but that’s only if you care to read anything the quests say, and some of the nuances in the things your decorations do on your rooms. The game can “improve” or “change” at any time, as well. Earlier when I was playing the game, I was going to make note of terrible use of screen real estate with the friend invite bar that is so usefully (/sarcasm) placed at the bottom of the screen at all times, and not knowing how many Dungeon Marks you actually have, but it was updated literally the next day and alleviated that “issue.” But that doesn’t mean that every version change is a good thing. The new version I had been playing made me freeze on the loading screens between different areas, resulting in it taking for-fucking-ever. When stuff like that happens, I guess you just have to wait until they fix it since they can potentially update it at any time without letting you know. In this case, the freezing issue was fixed by the next day.
Gameplay issues come mostly in the form of the intentional gating to artificially inflate the time one can spend on the game. For instance, you can only upgrade one thing at a time. Though, this provides a challenge in and of itself in the form of using time as a resource — what should you waste more time on to upgrade first and what will be more useful. It is easy to run out of tiles to build rooms on, and there is a hard cap for each dungeon — you just have to pay for the last 50. Research costs will grow exponentially, meaning you will have less and less times where you’re going to actually have enough research to get new features in the game. It would also be more convenient to be able to “request” supplies from your main dungeon rather than having to go your main dungeon and move supplies to your expansion dungeons each time you need something.
There is no “end” to this game, and that is good and bad thing. Good, because well, you can keep playing until you don’t want to, and bad because of how much money you might actually sink into the game. It is so easy to spend Dungeon Marks on temporary benefits, that it is quite scary. I also see the boasting of the game being a “massively multiplayer” game as a buzz word to get drawn in to initially playing. It is simply multiplayer with many people having persistent locations for their dungeons. There isn’t much of a way to tell if these other players are actually playing consistently or as much as you, other than checking out what level they are.
Whether or not the game is fun, I guess you could say it is. There is some sort of satisfaction in seeing your progress and upgrading of your dungeons as time goes on, and acquiring a massive amount of resources also has some weird pleasure factor involved, even if I don’t understand the intricacies of every single mechanic. If you like this sort of drop-in-a-bucket gameplay that Dungeon Overlord has to offer, then you should give it a try.
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