Disappointment Keeper, more like
Dungeon Keeper helped form me as a person. It didn't inform my morality or my personality, but it's one my earliest, clearest memories of time spent gaming as a kid. Years later it helped me forge a long-lasting friendship as a subsequently-discovered shared interest. My girlfriend has a lovely young nephew and when I think about the games I can introduce him to to develop his tastes, I remember what an impression games like Civilization II, Deus ex and Dungeon Keeper had on me and how fondly I will always remember them, and am in some foundational way comparing all of my other experiences with games now to those early feelings of wonder and flow.
So it might be a bit unfair to take that much baggage, tempered as it is by my self-critical adult psyche, to this new iteration of the IP. To take a step back for a moment, Dungeon Keeper has been serialised with the middling to decent Dungeon Keeper II. I didn't think much of it negatively or positively. It's slightly better in some ways, far deficient in others. They made the game into true 3D and increased the resolution of the textures, but also brightened the game and diluted the atmosphere and some of the occasionally punishing difficulty, which were both part of the charm. Many people were bitterly disappointed. To quote my friend Ciaran:
Worse graphics, much blander units with far less unusual abilities, no dragons and in general a game that lacked grit and variation.
This new mobile version is released by EA on iOS, so I decided to give it a go on my iPad. I have both an Irish and a U.S. iTunes account, so it was a surprise to find that I needed a Canadian iTunes account to get one. After about twenty minutes of wrangling with logins and loopholes, I finally managed to download the game and get started.
It was immediately apparent that this was a license cash-in. The narrator who provided so much menace and humour in the original is back, or at least expertly imitated, but the script is cheesy and edgeless, and the gameplay has been entirely lobotomised. What used to be a tightly-balanced real-time strategy game centred around a marriage of tactics and strategy has become an underground Farmville clone.
Want to build a training room? No problem! You just have to level up your dungeon heart! By spending thousands of gold! What's that? You only have the ability to store hundreds of gold? Easy! Level up your gold mine! It only takes four hours and thousands of stone! What's that? You only have the ability to store hundreds of stone? Easy! Level up your stone mine! With gems! What's that? You need loads more gems? Easy! Just mine out the gems! It'll only take three four hour chunks! Before you know it you're looking at a game full of chokepoints, witless feedback loops, anodised combat (a stupid asynchronous "raid" system) and pay-to-win "features". I'm not against games like this existing, as a genre it's not necessarily bad, even though it has a terrible reputation, but this game is definitely a particularly poor example.
In short, you should avoid this crappy bait'n'switch, especially if you loved the original. Seeing other classic games like KOTOR and DOOM coming to iOS, I don't see why they couldn't re-release the original Dungeon Keeper for mobile. I, for one, would trip over myself to buy it, even though I've bought it at least twice already, most recently from GOG.com. In fact, if you haven't played the original before, or it's been a while, head over and pick it up. It's $5.99 at the time of writing and you can get it here.