Dungeons 2 Reviews
While the long-term staying power might be arguable, "Dungeons 2" gives some great mechanics, good animation, and mixups to the gameplay loop that influence how players approach each situation.
Dungeons 2 is nowhere near the level I wanted it to be. It would have been nice to see an evolution of the dungeon management genre that takes things to the level of complexity of city-builders like Pharaoh or Zeus.
It's not to say that Dungeons 2 is a bad game, it's really not. But seeing as it has explicitly set itself up to compared to two fantastic games, it is difficult to look past how it fails to live...
Come for the dungeon management, stay for goofy minions like Jayzee, Am'Adamss, and Kato. We've seen a lot of "spiritual successors" to Dungeon Keeper, but none have lived up to that genre-defining product. Dungeons 2 is the culmination of a lot of hard work, and it's great that Kalypso and Realmforge could finally deliver on that often-promised and hardly-delivered goal. Sure, we may not always know what we want, but when somebody shows up and does it right, you immediately know.
It's a shame that there's such a reliance on cooldowns and it's an uphill struggle to keep resources growing, because RealmForge put together some real quality work here, and Dungeon Keeper fans have something well worth sinking their teeth into.
Unfortunately, what's new is simply the blending of two old parts that don't work well enough in conjunction.
As a follow-up to 2011's Dungeons, this sequel is much easier to recommend, fixing many of the problems from that game and introducing new ideas that fit better with the genre. It's still only a partial success, however, and between the fussy menus and interface, and the speed with which you'll find yourself resorting to trudging repetition, this still falls short of the game it could be.