Platform: PC

Developer: Realmforge Studios

Publisher: Kalypso Media Digital

Release Date: October 14, 2017

Genre: Strategy / Simulation

Nerd Rating: 4 out of 10

Reviewed by Kikopaff

When Dungeons 3 first fell on my lap, there was a sense of déjà vu and warmth. It looks eerily similar to World of Warcraft, the narrator sounds strikingly like the British guy from The Stanley Parable, and the top down, cartoonish 3D mechanics sucked me back to three years ago when League of Legends was my life. Its similarity to other franchises is intentional. The dungeon-strategy hybrid packs up all the pop culture references you can think of, wraps it with sarcasm, and gifts you a product aimed to entice. Instead, it’s like the weird gift you always seem to get from that distant relative, and you force a smile through gritted teeth.

Admittedly, I have never played a dungeon-strategy game. Or any real-time strategy games, for that matter. Beginning the genre through the Dungeons franchise probably isn’t the best way to enter the rite of passage, but it playfully introduces the core mechanics. Dungeons 2 received a fair amount of appraising, but many fans were looking to see what improvements Dungeons 3 offers. You have an underground dungeon, with the powerful Dungeonheart, the source of your evilness and the very crystal that opposing heroes want to destroy in order to kill you. You order lazy snots to build rooms, research new traits, hire creatures and take on the overworld with your minions to destroy everything that is bright, happy, and good. You are Evil, and you are determined to decimate the lands, no matter the cost. You recruit Thalya, a dark elf who seems to have an identity crisis as bad as Gollum/Sméagol, and she serves as your representative and leader of the dungeon.

A typical Dungeons 3 experience has layers of humor. Thanks to the memorable voice acting of the narrator and Thalya, their banters and comments are entertaining, to say the least. There are numerous satirical jokes and references all across pop culture, ranging from Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Dragon Ball, and more. Dungeons 3 is unashamed of its plentiful traits that strike the strings of many fans of these huge franchises. It’s the commentary that works surprisingly well with a genre that’s usually strategic, grindy and focused. So Dungeons 3 is supposed to be fun and cheeky. But in roughly six hours of gameplay, Dungeons 3 has crashed ten times. Ten. That’s not fun.

The game was running on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080, an Intel Core i7-7700K CPU and 16GB RAM. In other words, there is absolutely no reason why a beast cannot handle an insect. Even after playing around with video and gameplay settings, lowering as many specs as possible and even playing on windowed mode – Dungeons 3 continued to crash and burn. Every 30 minutes or so, the game frequently froze, and the dialogue, sound effects, and soundtrack continued to torture me into frustration like nothing was wrong. Pop up windows will tell me the program is not responding, or the screen just stays frozen until I cry. It never even goes past 20 FPS most of the time. For a game that’s currently priced at AUD$56.95 at the time of writing this review, it’s very difficult to ignore how unreliable the game’s system appears to be.

From what I was able to play through, Dungeons 3 progresses through its twenty campaigns very slowly. Its inconsistent controls render it frustrating and dull. Whilst maintaining your dungeon, you have no control over your workers or units. Every action happens on autopilot, leaving you idle with a snack or time to read the news. As your good-for-nothing goblins loiter around, all you can do is slap them with the Hand of Evil until they find something more productive – this feature attempts to be amusing, but you’ll probably just feel livid. Their sense of prioritization is so incompetent as you watch them move from setting up your traps, to sweeping the floor which doesn’t need any immediate attention.

The lack of control is agonizing as enemy heroes discover your dungeon and attempt to perform a coup d’état. As your Hand of Evil can only slap workers and pick up units, all you can do is dump your creatures into the assaults and hope they understand what they need to do. It’s awfully disappointing that you aren’t able to control what spells Thalya uses as watching her blaze enemies with firebombs are quite majestic to watch, but you’re left to sit on the sidelines and hope they survive the onslaught without your help. The enemy assaults also happen too often, making the minimal time you have to actually progress your dungeon stunted by rolling your eyes and picking up your creatures for another battle dump.

Instead, you control the rooms that your slaves build, as they mine for gold, dragon caves and other discoveries. Building rooms take a while as your goblins are slow at this activity too, but while waiting you can be efficient by exploring what you can research and improve. Rooms range from Horde quarters, treasuries, workshops and more. Each room gives certain buffs or improvements to your overall dungeon as well as the performance of your units. Building rooms and researching costs gold, which can be accumulated as your goblins dig rooms, mine gold veins and manage your treasury. Hiring workers and creatures are also important as the more you have, the quicker you can complete tasks and conquer lands in the overworld. Every campaign will have various objectives, but for the most part, you build and improve your dungeon until objectives are met, and repeat. The objectives themselves are fairly similar, and there’s no other motivation to complete the campaigns other than receive duplicate achievements through Steam for completing said objectives.

Another resource that’s used throughout your progress in Dungeons 3 is Evilness, and this is where the controls come back to you as you take on the overworld with your minions. Conquering ‘Good Lands’ allows you to build evil bases and it produces evilness aka glowing orange orbs that generate as a further resource to help you build rooms, research and improve your units. Generally, each Good Land or point of interest to capture will have enemy heroes to defeat, and this is when combat is at your touch. However, the combat mechanics itself are simple and still has an element of automacy to it. While you can click Thalya’s spells, she auto attacks her enemies anyway, leaving simple AoE spells as the only real ability of control and direction that you have. Your minions also don’t do very much aside from their basic attack, so even in opportunities of bloodthirst and monopoly, it still falls short of excitement.

Dungeon 3‘s graphics are atmospheric and colorful, able to set the moods of both dungeon and overworld. It’s a stark contrast between the Stormwind-looking overworld, to the decimating ash left by Thalya’s destruction and chaos. Textures are fairly smooth, although even in high anti-aliasing settings, there seems to be a fair amount of blur, especially during movement and combat. The bright colors can be a little too high on contrast, but Dungeons 3 is still great to look at. I wish there were more customization features included, such as camera rotation. Being limited to 2D scrolling and a set perspective sometimes affected what sized rooms I was building or even being able to zoom in and out more would have been helpful for combat, as selecting units can be finicky. Dungeon 3‘s soundtrack is also orchestral, creating powerful moods of honor versus wrath, especially during the contrast of good versus evil.

A huge chunk of my heart is devastated at the unfortunate game crashes that extremely inhibited my Dungeons 3 experience. It’s clearly a game that tries to offer new tastes and humor into the strategy genre, but while it tries to deliver one thing, it’s clearly something else. What it ends up becoming is a cheeky comment on pop culture, as well as its appreciation of it, but sorely lacks in polished gameplay functions. Its apathy towards player control and deep involvement is disappointing, and its easy difficulty doesn’t come across as inviting to the new player, but sort of offensive. I’m probably better off playing Overlord or Sid Meier’s Civilization series to redeem a negative strategy experience. For now, receiving the gift of Dungeons 3 will be met with a polite nod, a forced smile and an acknowledgment that Realmforge Studios tried. It’s not great, but hey, they tried.