Dungeons 3 review

Dungeons 3 review,

the real time strategy of Dungeons returns!

The redactor-that-reviews-games was going to analyze Dungeons 3, the last Realm Forge’s games, published by Kalypso. The redactor-that-reviews-games was initially not happy to review a strategy game (because him and strategy games doesn’t get a long each other, he’s too stupid) but he gave a chance to the game and played it for, like, thirthy hours non-stop before the embargo expires so he would write some awesome review.

The redactor-that-reviews-games was surprised how Realm Forge wrote the story, full of citations to Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Terminator, and fantasy cliché with the narrator commenting the redactor-that-reviews-games actions. However, the level of sarcasm and cliché can be changed in the options menu (Interstellar, anyone?).

Dungeons 3 starts narrating the awesome actions of the Evil that having conquered all the stuff and realms around him, he didn’t know what else to do. So, he shutted down into his dungeon for, like, lots of time leaving his servants be with nothing to do. Servants missed the Evil’s awesome actions when the Evil finally returns with some ideas: going over the oceans and conquered whatever lies there!

The first attempt was a failure: the ships sank.

Second attempt: the ships sank again. At the end, the Evil created a shadow that would have controlled peoples mind. He discovered an Evil Elf that was going to convert into Good by some random King. The Evil used the shadow to control the Evil Elf, which she turned into definitive evil. With the Elf turned into definitive evil, the Evil started to conquer the land he couldn’t control by himself because of the ships sunken.

Handling a Dungeon

Dungeons 3 it’s a point and click, a strategy game as you would notice from the title, we have a Heart to defend and protect from attacks of enemies of the Good while we send troops of evil outside the dungeon to expand the evil. That heart has a life, if it gets destroyed, well, you lose the game. (I can’t stand MOBA games, but this game is nice, don’t worry Realm Forge, PJN can keep a secret!)

That said, this game has some attack and defend mechanics well made. Not only we have a nice, efficient management of the dungeon built as cubes, where you can build corridors and rooms, but also troops of evil. It’s possible to build an Orcs, Goblin, Demons and not-dead army, eventually with eroes converted to evil. Of course, they need to rest, play, planning assassins, but more than anything they need to rest: after excavating a small corridor, you can build an hideout from the menu that slides from the interface to the left and take all the cubes you can as much as big is the troop. All this has a cost, so it’s necessary to find money, gold source. Gold source its essential to maintain troops, build room, etcetera. You can find ‘em thourgh the dungeon, just have to discover them. Gotta mine, Little Snots! These little slaves can be slapped every moment if you think theyre slowing down the work. More work mean more fatigue, right? Energies. How you build up energies without eating? Orcs and Golbins might faint in battle or protesting for not having feed them. So we can build a farm full of turkeys. Which they will be eaten.

You’ll also have Mana to use, in order to be able to perform magic attacks (arrow rains and such), enhance the horde or the dungeon. You can find Mana like you do with Gold, extracting from the dungeon or outside! Mana is useful, because of the IA being not very smart, you can defend the dungeon from outside attack waiting for the horde to wake up. I’ll tell you why later.

eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate

Dungeons 3 is in essence, a Tower Defense game, because is necessary to let guard the dungeon by some troop of the Evil horde, or creating corridors full of traps in order to defend the dungeon from outside attacks. And if you want to build traps, you gotta build a factory that produces instruments boxes, necessary to build, well, everything is made in iron and wood or spring. Attacks of the Good from the outside will come in a very frequent way, they want to destroy the Heart of the Evil dungeon. And we want to defend it. Unfortunately, the AI it’s well made, but not perfect: it will happen sometimes that the Horde won’t recognize whats going on in that moment, so you gotta grab all of them by youself and throw them into the middle of the battle. Same goes when someone is hungry, and it says you don’t have turkeys to feed him. Too bad I HAVE turkeys to feed them. Same can be said when they want to sleep, and It doesn’t have any bed to sleep. Sometime I got myself to count every  single bed associated to every member of the horde. I had enough beds to let them sleep.

The games is playable even after you finish the main campaign thanks to the Skirmish mode. This mode lets you play in a dungeon like you normally did in the campaign, with the differences that you can modify something: difficulty level, initial resources, available resources, surprises, and the map can be random generated. If you want, you can play in the same map all the times thanks to the fact that you can generate a map through numbers. If you put the same numbers, you can play the same map! The games does have a co-op mode. Just invite him/her.

The redactor-that-reviews-games was surprised how graphically accurate is the game. Awesome animations, the machinery are good looking, water is good looking as well, the environments are full of lively colors. Exept for the Evil dungeon, that is full of dark light, red fire and brown stuff. Dungeons 3 is well optimized, but not perfectly optimized: I noticed some random stuttering and framerate drops when maps were more big than usual and when there are more characters on the field to handle. Graphics options are not present, you can only manage resolution and if you want to put the game into full screen or not. The games Is very nice looking on Full HD though.

By the way, the slider that lets you change resolution doesn’t change the ENTIRE game resolution, just internal graphics, it won’t change the interface so you can read a clear text while playing with 16 bit graphics of the game. Awesome if you have a potato computer on a Full HD monitor, right?

I want to thank Kalypso and Realm Forge for the awesome Italian localization, even though there are some puntuaction errors in the subtitles, but the dubbing is just right.

The game was played on a GTX960 2GB, i5 4460, 8GB RAM, SSD Samsung EVO 850 120GB