Dungeons - The Dark Lord

Had potential but is neglected. Avoid

I picked this up in a bundle hoping for a fun dungeon management sim, and while the core concept — building rooms to attract heroes, satisfying their needs, then incapacitating them for soul energy — is genuinely clever and different from what most people expect, the execution drags it down hard. The Kalypso launcher DRM is a frustrating barrier just to play a singleplayer game, and once you're actually in, the pacing is painfully slow with autosaves that can strand you hours back. Managing three Dungeon Lords with a hotbar that doesn't swap between them is a UI nightmare, and as heroes level up they snowball into unkillable deathballs that make every level feel like a desperate race you're destined to lose. There are moments where building and decorating your dungeon clicks and feels satisfying, but the game constantly undercuts that with unclear objectives, micromanagement hell, and a difficulty curve that punishes patience rather than rewarding it. Unless you're grabbing it for nearly free in a bundle, skip it.

Crashes all the time, and even without that, the game is far from being as good and funny as the subsequent games.

If you thought Dungeons was a mess of a game, boy did they set out to make Dungeons look good... by making something so much worse. Basic gameplay-wise, it is a better game, with plenty of quality of life features that should've been in the game in the first place. The tutorial is even better, shockingly! So, if you just wanted to play the awful multiplayer, this is the one to play, but everything else? So much worse, the story is just a Lord of the Rings parody, and not even a good one, and the level design is AWFUL! They clearly just gave up and decided to make it so difficult that no one would try to finish it. This isn't worth your time, even if you liked Dungeons. If Dungeons is a very flawed 6/10 game, Dungeons - The Dark Lord is the handicapped brother, and I'd give it a 3/10.

This is the first time I decide to make a review before finishing the game. + interesting concept + It is nice building and decorating the dungeon. - No one. NO ONE wants to use the Calypso launcher. - You might lose your game with the game key or the launcher password EVEN THOUGH you have it on Steam. - abyssmal humour (well the usual humour in this series) - You get missions where the enemies are leveling more quickly than you can kill them and use the resources you get from them to level up your own units which means you cannot kill them and therfore cannot extract resources anymore before getting overrun. - And the point before that could be ok. Games can be hard. Try again. ... Try what? You do not have that much agency to change your approach. - Speaking of agency, there are levels where you have to steer a group of character units which is something I usually really like in strategy games. However, this game is made for controlling a single dungeon lord and manage the dungeon. So you control one character unit at a time and the others will follow the selected one. Now you are fighting enemies that have already leveled a lot, so you are pulling them one by one from a room t…

Hated it, waste of money.