War for the Overworld is a love-letter, plain and simple.
Older gamers will remember Dungeon Keeper as it actually should be: a witty RTS that helped to launch Lionhead Games and continued to skyrocket Peter Molyneux’s profile. It didn’t take itself seriously; Dungeon Keeper relied on humour and tactics just outside of the norm to carve its own little niche into the burgeoning strategy genre.
While Dungeon Keeper 2 continued the trend, it ended there; EA and developer Bullfrog Productions never got around to releasing the third iteration of the franchise, subtitled War for the Overworld. Years later, a freemium mobile game used the Dungeon Keeper name and practically ran it into the ground.
Today, it’s Kickstarter coming to the franchise’s rescue.
Easily hitting its funding goal, War for the Overworld is a fan-made sequel offering the game fans were promised but never received. Subterranean Games was formed for the express purpose of creating this particular game and does so in an extraordinary manner; the studio has staffers based all over the world. Think Ori and the Blind Forest, but instead of a heart-warming game, you’re playing as a disembodied Underworld Warlord slapping around minions and feeding the disobedient into the slaughterhouse blades if food supplies get low.
If you’ve never played Dungeon Keeper, WftO’s first couple campaign missions will give you a very good idea of what to expect. Series mainstay Richard Ridings – alongside his booming, Christopher Lee-like voice and very dark humour – is back, guiding newcomers and returning fans alike through the basics of the game. It’s relatively simple: using an isometric view which can be zoomed and angled, you control a dungeon core, slowly expanding its reach to attract new followers. Your end goal, essentially, is to take over the world(s).
It sounds easy, but gets harder from there. War for the Overworld is all about micromanagement. To attract fighters, you’ll need to get your worker minions to find a nearby portal. With newfound fighters in your camp, you’ll need to build barracks to train them, keeping an eye on the lazy ones and forcibly sending them to training when necessary. You can slap them around, too, to encourage better behaviour… or really, just for some fun.
Your minions have to eat, so you’ll also have to build a slaughterhouse to kill a seemingly endless supply of little pigs for nourishment; I had to remind myself I was evil incarnate and had to be strong when I heard pigs squealing as they died. Moreover, minions are loyal to a point; you need to pay them in gold, meaning you’ll need to find new veins of the stuff, plus build a vault to store what you’ve found. Said minions also get hurt and tired, so you’ll need to keep an eye on their happiness and their health “petals” – a weird, flowery concept, given the dark nature of the game – to ensure continued success.
So yeah, micromanagement.
A game usually goes like this: find a portal, start excavating, find gold, locate the path from which Heroes (they’re the baddies, don’t forget) might attack your core, fortify that position, build, build, build some more and then crush your opponents. For fun, you can ‘possess’ your troops, seeing the world from their eyes and fighting opponents rather than leaving it to the troops themselves.
It’s fun, to a point.
Once you’ve worked through enough campaign levels and understand how the game works, you can pretty much work it. Hero AI is rather shoddy; good-baddies will travel along the same path, and once you find the (usual) single pathway from their camp to yours, you can simply block it and watch as your opponents pile up. When you’re prepared to take them on, you can either snipe them or send a larger mass of force to decimate them. It’s fun to hack-and-slash, but gets old rather quickly. If campaign gets too stale, the game also offers Sandbox and competitive modes. Sandbox is good for a little play, and multiplayer gives the game the soul it really needs, pitting you against an enemy you’ll actually be worried about.
War of the Overworld stays true to the Dungeon Keepers before it, but here’s where its real problem lies. No one at Subterranean came to the project as a game designer, so they’ve been learning as they go. It’s one thing to borrow from a game to create a new one, but usually, some attempt at innovation comes along with the deal. While Subterranean has done a great job of capturing the feel of Dungeon Keeper, that’s about all it does, and the result is a title that feels half-baked and a tad flat. The game has spent some time in Steam Early Access, but I feel like it could have stayed there even longer, just to tighten up the solid foundation that’s clearly present. It’s a release that you can see potential in, even if the finished product doesn’t quite follow through. It’s all style and flash, and lacking substance.
Those wanting a hit of nostalgia or those that love the RTS genre and have a black sense of humour will enjoy War for the Overworld. Hell, those types have all probably Kickstarted it already. For everyone else, this is a bit of a bland release — a love letter lacking a soul; ironic, given the nature of the game, but disheartening nonetheless.
War for the Overworld was reviewed using a review code on Steam, as provided by the publisher.
Review: War for the Overworld
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