Forget Call of Duty, Real Men Need the Retro Love: Dungeon Keeper

The PC is the natural home of certain strategy games, what with its capacity for precision mouse-clickery and all. Command and Conquer, Total War and such would be/are utter ballaches when ported to consoles and their controllers. As such, it's no surprise that one of the most demented, brilliant, creepy and hilarious strategy games is to be found on PC: Dungeon Keeper.

Let's party like we're still using Windows 95 and take another look at this lost classic.

Across gaming, for so long, we have been cast as the good guys. Adventures and RPGs have one primary objective: to save the world, to rescue the distressing damsel, to kick some supervillain or other in the man-plums. If we're being pernickety, that's three primary objectives, but the concept remains: being an asshole doesn't come into it. You want to throw the neighbor's gerbil in front of a speeding SUV? Well screw you, because you can't.

That is to say, you couldn't. Evil is Good was the motto splayed across the box of this 1997 release, and it meant it. You take the role of an anonymous ‘Keeper,' shown on-screen only as a huge green grabby hand of claw-y grabbing that doubles as the mouse cursor. This being is invading the Realm of Joy by constructing a series of dungeons underground, housing all manner of dark creatures and training them up to defeat the forces of good above.

You begin each level with only your Dungeon Heart (a literal beating heart housed in some kind of dome, which you must defend; if the enemies break through your forces and destroy it, you must restart the stage) and a few lowly Imps under your command. These guys are the main workers, who tunnel through the Earth allowing you to expand and mine gold with which to buy new dungeon rooms. From there, you start attracting various sorts of horrifying beast from the depths of the Devil's dick to your cause.

This is done by claiming portals under the ground, which allow them to enter your dungeon. The minions you will get depend on the rooms you've built. The purple-robed wizardly badass that is the Warlock will join you if you have constructed a library, which also allows you to research magic spells to use against opponents. Meanwhile, the tiny and utterly shit-tastic looking Demon Spawn loves the training room (a sort of evil gym where your minions gain experience). And looks like a mutant tadpole, but that's irrelevant.

Dungeon Keeper is fondly remembered for its creativity, its dark humor and the freedom of the gameplay. You can opt for a musclehead approach, training your beasts to the highest level possible and smiting those do-gooding bastards with a good ol' fashioned evil ass-whupping. You can also be more fiendish, reinforcing your lair with doors and assorted traps (the best of which being the boulder trap, a spiked horror which will roll over opponents and crush them into blood-leaking bone fragments like the one in Indiana Jones) and laughing at the Heroes' pitiful attempts to invade.

The sequel contained a brief trailer for Dungeon Keeper 3, which never materialized. We have been pissed about this fact for over a decade, but Kickstarter's War for the Overworld stirrings show that we haven't seen the last of Dungeon Keeper after all:

Source of images: gggames.se.