The building hud worried me a little bit because it seems you will place entire rooms instead of designating room space but that's not a deal breaker for me.
Sadly I cannot say the same.
The great thing about DK was that it was your dungeon. You build it just as you like. One of my best memories is of me playing the third level of DK(the one with the 3 gems at the bottom) and digging out the entire underground, with the exception of the walls around rooms. So it seemed like it was a city built in an underground cavern. And then training every single dude up to level 10.
And then there was that frog thing. I always sent a single frog thing into the next level, starting from the 3rd level. When it reached the ice level, I trained it into a dragon. Then trained the dragon to level 10 and just carried the darn thing through a lot of the levels. You could actually instantly win on the ice island level. Just possess the dragon and take a walk through the lava to the enemies heart.
Damn, DK was a good game.
I've been told that DK was pretty cool, but I was something like 2 years old or so when it came out so I didn't ever get to play it unfortunately.
DKII was one of the best games I've played (or maybe that's just nostalgia talking), but I have to say it had some problems.
The patches actually made the AI retarded, made the game incompatible with modern computers (without running in compatibility mode and some other nonsense), and caused it to crash all the damn time. Looking at a big battle? Crash! Running a map for more than a couple minutes? Crash! Trying to save the game in case it crashes? Crash! Trying to open the menu that leads to saving so that you can save the game in case it crashes? Crash! Fortunately the release version of the game and the very first patch were quite stable and featured (mostly) intelligent AI, but there are few companies that release patches that actually markedly reduce the quality of the game. Plus, the last patch version's maps are incompatible with maps from every other version, which is somewhat inexplicable and really annoying.
Besides that, the campaign's difficulty was very...sporadic to say the least. The first couple of levels were piss easy, being tutorial missions. Then come a couple of maps where you can lose if you aren't careful, but are also sort of tutorialish (being for prisons, torturing, lava/associated creatures and casinos, respectively). Then there's that level where you have to catch the hero-gathering lord before he crosses the map, which is nigh impossible to succeed on your first run because unlike every other lord, who fights you on sight, when he sees a giant army/array of traps in his way he sprints right past at speeds that would make Usain Bolt jealous. Its easy once you know the trick (Lightning him as his guards all run right past, then dump a bunch of creatures on his face before he can get up), but a pain until then.
Then there's goddamn Woodsong, probably the hardest level in the game, in which you have to punch through a line of mid-high level heroes besieging a fairly weak keeper's heavily guarded base (through traps, as he only has goblins, etc in terms of troops) and then kill the keeper yourself. While you're trying to set up a base to do all this, you've got 4 Hero bases throwing attacks at you and throwing you off balance (since in practical terms you have to clear them all out before you even try to break the siege). Oh, and did I mention that this is a timed mission, and if you run out of time a gigantic high level hero army comes down and kills you? Plus, if the heroes kill the keeper instead of you, you ALSO lose. The timer "goes off" when you breach the walls of the enemy keeper, so not only do you have to beat him in time, you have to get through his entire base and kill him before the hero army (which, might I mention, is chilling out in the middle of the map between your two dungeons) reaches either dungeon and destroys either dungeon heart. There are two (somewhat counterintuitive) routes to winning this one, and if you don't know either this level will make you bash your face against the desk.
After that are a variety of fun and not at all difficult levels that are all very tutorialish up until the third to last level, a confrontation with your biggest Keeper rival, which is piss easy because he doesn't actually attack you ever. The last two levels are moderately challenging, but neither is anywhere near as hard as Woodsong. It's all really rather weird.
So what was my point again? Oh yeah, if Bullfrog made DKII open source making a great third would be a matter of improving the AI, fixing the engine to be less buggy with modern computers, and making the levels adhere to a difficulty curve rather than a difficulty spike-pit.