Dungeon Keeper 2 - Retrospective @ EDGE

EDGE has a new retrospective Dungeon Keeper 2.

The sound of digging pervades Dungeon Keeper 2. Bullfrog’s 1999 realtime strategy game involves the construction and operation of a dungeon and its associated labyrinth in a gloomy, underground world. There are always chambers to be excavated, minerals to be mined and exploratory tunnels to be dug in order to expand your area of play. The imps, tiny magical creatures who comprise your basic workforce, are continually scraping and picking away at the ground somewhere, carrying out your orders.

It’s a pleasantly double-edged sound – industrious, but also subversive. You’re eating away at the world around you, undermining, corroding, tunnelling like a colony of termites. And if your imps run out of orders and stop working – you’ll see them sit against the wall and light up cigarettes – you might still hear digging. That would be the sound of one of your rival keepers chipping away at the rock in your direction, heading inexorably towards you.

Building and undermining at the same time – that’s the centre of the appeal of Dungeon Keeper 2. The player must design and construct a detailed and multi-functional underground world to perform a number of tasks, but also revel in destruction, murder, torture and slavery. Indeed, those are the tasks. This is a dungeon, after all. In other hands, DK2 could have been a recipe for dreary sadism. But Bullfrog put together a world that was all about beautiful, rich, detailed, absorbing, funny sadism.