Dungeon Keeper 2 Retrospective

While we wait for more info on Mythic’s new mobile-focused Dungeon Keeper, you might want to read this retrospective on Dungeon Keeper 2 from EDGE, from which I’m going to quote a brief snippet:

As you’re laying out rooms and corridors, assigning functions to them, attracting employees and specialists, a particular strain may be identified in DK2’s twisted DNA: it is obviously a descendant of Bullfrog’s Theme Hospital, which was developed in parallel with the original Dungeon Keeper and released just months before it in 1997. So where are the patients? In Theme Hospital, the aim was to keep the members of the public who strayed into your world alive, and they mostly only died by accident. Mostly. In DK2, the roaming members of the public are tedious, bellowing heroes, representatives of the so-called forces of good, and if they find their way into your realm they need to be subjected to a deadly form of triage.

Your troll-filled workshops can build traps, from simple passive defences like doors to the all-time classic: a rolling Indiana Jones-style boulder that can crush everything in its path. In between are all kinds of dangling skeletons and the always useful poison-gas vents.

Many happy hours can be spent ringing your lair with fiendish killing-chambers, hidden triggers and secret passages. Softened up by the traps, surviving heroes can be set upon by your creatures and beaten to within an inch of their life. Enemies are mostly just stunned if they lose a fight and while thus poleaxed, they can be dragged to a prison. There, they will either starve and rise as a skeleton to join your armies, or they can be dropped in a torture chamber where they’ll be tormented by whip-wielding dominatrices called Mistresses (a saucy element the game revels in) and become allies.

Your own creatures can, when stunned, be dragged back to the lair to recover. If the imps are too late and the creatures die, they can be dragged to a graveyard and buried, later to rise as vampires. It could have been called Theme Necropolis.