War for the Overworld

This was meant to be a surprise since I was going to record and post this game as an LP, but we need to have a little chat about War for the Overworld.

What is this game? Well, this is kind of like the spiritual successor to the Dungeon Keeper series. It IS the Dungeon Keeper series essentially, but at the same time...it is not. The game is a kickstarter game released officially yesterday. It was around for early access, but I had forgotten about it and was none-the-wiser. Oliver told me about the game and I picked it up, because really, when Dungeon Keeper 2 is one of my all-time favourite games, and, incidentally, my first ever LP, I couldn't pass it up. So why do we need to chat?

Because the problems with the game are conflicting with my nostalgia. So last night I booted up the game, albeit not as excited as I should have been (I had a rough night) and was welcomed with a very loud menu screen. I went into the sound options to fix this. It's...not a sound option you can fix. The ambient noise in the menu is not one I can alter, so I need to use the windows sound to lower the overall game volume. Okay, whatever, small issue. I get into the , watch a cinematic (which was...all right yeah makes sense to set the stage) and it is also incredibly loud with no way to fix it. Also it seems to be very similar to Overlord's plot (if it has the same plot twist at the end I'm going to strangle a bear). Then we get to the campaign map. It looks like a Dungeon Keeper map. Swell. I click on the tutorial level and listen to the instructions, narrated by the mentor (who is the same voice actor as the first two games...cool!) Only the sound is still unbalanced and some of the voice acting just seems...weird to me. I want to say it sounds a little forced, but I don't know if it's just the specific inflections, or if the voice just isn't edited to be deep enough. I try and start...and then windows delightfully decides to throw the online permissions pop-up in my face. It crashes Fraps, which then crashes the game. GG.

I boot up the game again, watch the cinematic...again and try to start the level and finally get in. And this is where things get interesting.

Immediately upon entering the game I can see it's all there. The Dungeon Heart...I MEAN DUNGEON CORE. The rooms like the training room (UH BARRACKS), and the hatchery (ER UM SLAUGHTER HOUSE). I can see the gold, you can dig out areas for rooms, there are imps (uh workers?) and the legions of overly pompous and pathetic heroes. Only things are a little different. Rooms aren't simply given or researched by the sorcerers (er cultists...), you need to allocate "evil points" in what looks like a technology tree. And you get them in REALLY WEIRD orders. Yes, I am totally biased, but this is weird guys. I understand why it can't be just like the other games (copyright lollllll), and frankly, I don't mind a little change up. I'm going to still call everything what I'm used to calling it. Deal with it. This goes for the creatures as well.

So what do I like about all this and what do I not like? Well here's a list because I can't organize my thoughts enough right now to form coherent sentences. We'll start with the bad, and then move to the good.

Bad:
1. Buggy as hell - I have found multiple bugs already. For instance, in possession, if you select one of those whip options for the imps and click...your arm becomes a blur of movement in a jittery spazfest. Another one is for some reason, randomly, I could not build rooms, or select minions or sell anything. I think this is tied to the events manager where the game wants you to build something specific, but you ignore it or were doing something else at the time it assaulted you with objectives. Last, which was my all time FAVOURITE (and by this it made me want to start gnawing on my arm) was that if your dungeon heart is under attack, the game decides that this is the best time to drop your frame rate down to 1, as in it freezes for a couple seconds before recovering back to 60fps for a second and then freezes again. It becomes unplayable because you cannot act fast enough, in the 1 second you have to try and do something about it. I will need to start a level over because I just couldn't do anything.

2. Possession sucks - If you played DK2, you'll know that possession was extremely easy to use, had smooth movements and allowed you to fight, claim land and dig tunnels yourself. Here, you move like there's super glue on your feet. If you try to change directions while moving, you come to abrupt halt and get stuck on nothing, causing you to hammer the keys to get you moving again. If you stop and use the

3. The mini-map - What the hell asufhasliukfnaekdrsdfskfasld. This mini-map is messed up. Like really messed up. Okay so you enter the dungeon viewing the dungeon heart at an angle. This element is the same as DK2. That is fine. You can't click on the map and reorient it. You are always at an angle. Maybe I haven't been playing long enough to figure this out, but I'm pretty sure this is the map. You can't bring up the map fullscreen to look at things. AND IT IS CONFUSING. It's on an angle just like the view on the main screen is. So you look at the map and say, oh something is happening to my right...so you scroll to the right...and realize that whatever is happening is not actually to the right. It's actually UP. Not only that, but there's another bug where if you are being attacked, you get pinged, only sometimes you get pinged in a random corner of the map for no reason...

4. The camera - THAT'S A NICE LOOKING WALL. Okay so whenever the game takes over the camera to show you a new creature entering the dungeon, you hardly SEE the creature because the camera spends 75% of the time jammed in the wall. Great.

5. Story - I have no idea if they're going somewhere, but really, what made the other two games great on this front was the simplicity of it. Hi, you are an evil overlord. You want to take over shit. Great. Let me debrief you on this area, a little background on what you need to do to achieve your goal and GO. If they make this more than that, I will be upset (see previous comment about strangling a bear).

6. Over-explaining and hand-holding - Yeah, I get not everyone has played Dungeon Keeper before. Good on you for having the tutorial, but a lot of this stuff can be explained with a single line of dialogue. We don't need hightlighted areas, we don't need ten lines of dialogue explaining something simple (multiple times). Point to an area once, or move the camera to show, but don't make this excessive people. We can figure it out. We're evil overlords. Just let go and let us figure out on our own how to destroy our enemies, body and soul.

7. Zoom - Since I can't view the map in fullscreen (easily at least...I will look into this again). It'd be great if you could zoom out more. You can't. Only zoom in. In fact you can zoom in so far that you can essentially see the nose hairs on the cultists. Great. I'd prefer to zoom out.

8. Sound balancing - No matter what I do, some of the audio is too loud, and some is too quiet. this is going to take a lot of work to get to reasonable levels. Also some of the voice acting has some REALLY weird pronunciations, and I'm pretty sure that's not an accent issue.

Good:
1. Humour - The humour is still there! And that element is great! Some of the humour is unintentional, but it's still there! I like the dark humour and silliness. Micropigs! Hilarious! This is exactly how it should be.

2. Tone - While it has some significant changes in feel, the basics are still there. It's cut-throat, dark, and has those elements of the first game in it. I even appreciate the constant nagging, cause really that was a thing before (though I will rage before the end). I'm just waiting for the shit to hit the fan.

3. Graphics - Game is fairly pretty. There are some low-res assets, but those can be overlooked unless the camera is jammed places it shouldn't be. The tiles and the rooms look pretty neat. You an see where all the effort went in this game. There are some issues, like particle effects breaking and units turning into a mess of black squares when they die, but overall, its not bad. I could pick out a few other REALLY weird things, but that's just nit-picking at this point.

4. Level design - I see no problems with this so far. Looks like there will be good elements of strategy and a variety of environments to deal with. This is what I will continue to play the game for. I may rage, I may have issues with the interface and whatnot, but as long as the game FUNCTIONS and has the ability to challenge me in terms of the actual intended gameplay, I will play and finish this game.

5. Getting the old voice actor - As forced as it sounds sometimes, the voice actor is a nice touch. He is the same guy from the first two games (as mentioned before). My largest complaint is that his voice isn't deep enough in the campaign overview screen and randomly changes volumes (I still don't know the difference between "campaign voice" and "mentor voice" and if I set them at the same level, one is still quieter than the other and it makes no sense to me at all).


So should you get it?

I don't have a clue. I can see a lot of people playing this for nostalgia reasons. I have seen swaths of good comments and people raving about the game. Is it as good as the hype says it is? No. In my opinion it is not. It needs work. If they fixed the bugs, made possession and the interface more intuitive and smoother, than yes, this would a decent game. Currently, I am playing it solely for the level design and nostalgia aspect. I sincerely hope they fix a lot of things.


EDIT: I hoped and they delivered. Got an update today and they fixed a lot of things. Possession is a little less annoying (but still buggy). Attacks on the Dungeon Core do not freeze the game (though frame rate drops randomly and drastically in places). Sound has been rebalanced so things sound nice. The interface is now easier to interact with and doesn't lock me out anymore. Good job devs =D