Dungeons 4

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Dungeons 4 review
Dan Lenois

Review

A fun irrelevant romp for both longtime fans and newcomers alike...

Dungeons 4, released a good six years after its 2017 predecessor, reunites players with the dark elf protagonist Thalya and her diabolical overlord, the Dungeon Lord, and their shared plan to beat up unicorns, burn grass, and otherwise publicly humiliate (and ultimately eradicate) the forces of good.

Simultaneously, there's also the secondary prerogative of building the biggest, baddest, most efficiently evil-glorifying dungeon to ever exist in your particular carefully-portioned land permit.



Creating the perfect lair...


While the unwieldy combination of voice-over narration and PNG images does enough to give you a basic premise connecting each level, no one can honestly say Dungeons has ever been a story-driven franchise. The real heart of the game has always been, as the name suggests, in the dungeon gameplay itself. But what makes the perfect dungeon? That, in large part, is left up to you, the player.

Whether you want to make a neat, efficient dungeon, with no replicated rooms nor unnecessary passages, that's your call. Alternatively, if you choose to spend a ton of resources on defensive usually-fatal gimmicks or other equipment, making your dungeon a deathtrap, you absolutely can.

Each level will provide certain mandatory objectives you need to fulfil, such as uncovering a second dungeon entrance/exit buried behind layers of rock your minions will have to dig up, or going up into the overworld to cause chaos and reap destruction on perfectly-innocent villagers and champions of justice. However, for those looking to do a bit more than the bare minimum, each level will also offer a number of additional side objectives that grant generous rewards.



Dealing with the little snots...


While Thalya remains the default player character, you can't expect the usually-faithful lieutenant of absolute evil to be labouring away clearing rock, sawing wood into place, etc. So you have your little snots (NPC minions) automate such actions. However, they don't always seem to want to do their jobs. While denying them luxuries like food and a place to sleep will definitely cause some civil protests among your little snots, there are a ton of other random moments where they will inexplicably not recognize orders to cut away rock, build rooms, etc.

Sometimes this bug can be fixed by manually invalidating all existing orders then re-marking said spots with new identical orders, but even this doesn't always work.



Commanding an Army of Evil...


You can't burn villages, slaughter their inhabitants and defenders, and cast a shadow of darkness across the land without the help of a loyal, if not overly-intelligent, army. Each unit has their particular role in battle. You have brutish melee fighters, AOE projectile casters, bigger tanking units, and support healers to keep your army alive. Knowing how to balance your army's composition is like learning to make your dungeon efficient. You'll never succeed if you don't grasp the basics.

Conquering the overworld is a very gradual process. Similar to a MOBA, you take out individual smaller locations, in this case being towns or hero camps instead of the traditional MOBA towers, thereby hampering your foe's offensive capabilities and pushing them back to their remaining control points.

Destroying all the opposing locales will not be easy however, so learning when to make a graceful tactical retreat, aka teleport your troops back underground via magic spell when you realize you're in over your head, is an absolute necessity. It's easy to underestimate enemy AI difficulty, when you go from defeating a small roving band of self-righteous heroes, to then taking on a far heavier-defended town, complete with canons and towers.

Dungeons, like most other RTS titles, is not particularly fast-paced. Throughout this review, each level would take anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes to complete, depending on the difficulty. As with most games, there are the arbitrary "Easy", "Normal", and "Hard" difficulties. For the purposes of this review, everything was played out at "Normal". So even the with loading/saving options available, this isn't the kind of game to jump into if you only have ten minutes at a time to spare.



Overall:


Dungeons 4 stands out easily as the best entry in the long-lasting series. Its notable flaws, such as the sometimes-reticent minion AI and repetitive overworld dialogue, can be annoying, but don't negate the game's far more numerous enjoyable mechanics.

Its campaign is well-designed and does an excellent job of slowly establishing new additional mechanics. There is little need for a tutorial when the game goes out of its way to flawlessly familiarize the player with everything they need to know organically through the missions themselves.

Whether you're a newcomer or long-time fan, Dungeons 4 is bound to provide hours of replayable fun.


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8.5

fun score

Pros

Unique sardonic wit, comprehensive UI design, varied level design.

Cons

Minion AI sometimes ignores orders for inexplicable reasons, repetitive dialogue, tedious late-game resource management