So I find it pleasingly evil sounding and looking now, compared to where it was a lllllllllooooooooooooonnnnnnnngggggggg time ago. Buggy feeling though. A major hero attack on my Dungeon Core caused the game to lock up for....about a 1 minute, and it hitched significantly every time heroes came at my dungeon heart every 30 seconds or so from then on. Tool tips still contain a gross amount of debug information that drowns out any useful information it might contain. The narrator narrates normal game stuff over the SP campaign tutorial which leads to a lot of him repeating himself.
Props to the dialog though, and the minion chatter, it's over the top and amusing as you'd expect and seemingly high quality.
Along with that, the dungeon feels more alive with that than it once did. There's lots of ambient audio and minion chatter. But somehow payday, feeding, relaxing....just seem to get lost in the noise. It leads me to suspect there's some fudging going on there, where needs are met without the requisite walking around. Guys go to a tavern now to get fed by your pig pens, and a giant gun I guess shoots food at them? Efficient but I think they did it to cut down on the amount of time your guys are hung up doing stuff. I have yet to see a conga line to the treasury, or a group of minions actually eating.
Bizarrely, on the trap tutorial level, they give you...pretty much no time or minions to build said traps as the rate it seemed to want, which lead to said hordes of heroes wailing on my dungeon core (which was easily dealt with by just planting my rally flag there, watching my grossly overleveled minions pound them, and lightning striking all the healers. So. Yay traps.) Mostly it's due to the tutorial level design and the scripting, but the tutorial oddly doesn't force you do things a particular way other than to trigger the next part of the script. So like, if their goal was to teach you to build a huge wall of traps to fend off enemies, the tutorial doesn't really do a good job of achieving that. Considering how many tutorials make things idiot proof, it was a little quirky playing one that kinda failed to set itself up to teach you what it wanted to. They tell you to build doors and then hit you with 3 waves of guys coming from 3 different directions, so while you're busy doing what the tutorial said, it's already moving ahead on the expectation you, I dunno, magically conjured 50 doors out of your ass and are ready to lay a fresh round of traps.
Some of the splash screens and intros to the menus are the ones from beta and EA, and their out of game menus feel kinda clunky still. The game runs smooth as glass otherwise on my system, so it's playable but it shows a lot of odds and ends of an indie team. Particularly the way tool tips are both overloaded with pointless information and lacking in useful information. All the skills in possession mode just list their name on the tool tip, nothing to tell you what they actually do. Nor are there controls explaining any of that anywhere, since there's no control mapping that I've found yet. Nor a place to read about what the skills of your minions are as they level up.
So released, yes, looks pretty, yes, runs well.....yes? Mostly? Still at a beta level of polish as far as the little details go? Yes. Is it Dungeon Keeper? It's as close as we're going to ever get I think, and that's pretty close. I think they have a ways to go on polishing the AI, performance and tying up loose ends, but so far it seems like a pretty solid buy and something I'll pursue the SP campaign in.
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Topic: War for the Overworld. out of early access and menaces with spikes of bugs (Read 7036 times)