Dungeons 4 – The Good, the Bad and the Evil

Forty minutes into a mission I finally had the layout I wanted. Gold veins tapped, worker quarters ringing the production rooms so nobody wasted travel time, one clean corridor from the entrance down to the treasury. Then a hero party wandered in through a side passage I had carved as a shortcut for my own diggers, and ninety seconds later my economy was rubble. That is the whole loop in one sentence. Every room you place is simultaneously a production building and a piece of terrain, and the moment you optimise purely for walking distance you have handed the AI a corridor straight into your bank. Structurally this is two games stacked on top of each other. Underground, you are running a dungeon-management sim: dig tiles, claim territory, place rooms whose adjacency and access routes decide both your throughput and your kill zones, keep a growing roster of creatures fed, housed and paid so they do not sulk. Above ground, you push a more conventional real-time strategy campaign, marching your forces across the surface map to burn down whatever the good guys have built. The two layers feed each other. Surface progress unlocks pressure relief below, and a healthy dungeon economy is the only reason you can afford to lose an army topside. Missions are long, frequently an hour or more, and the game does not apologise for that. What works is the decision density in the first twenty minutes. Build order matters here in a way it usually does not in comedy strategy games. Do you rush your income rooms and gamble that the first hero wave is small, or spend early tiles on a defensible funnel and accept a slower ramp? Do you spread three creature types thin so you have an answer to everything, or commit to one branch and let its unit quarters snowball? Because your workers dig at a fixed rate, tile budget is a real currency, and I ended up mentally costing out expansions the way you cost out buildings in an economy RTS. The narration is genuinely funny and, more importantly, does not interrupt the planning. The level editor and the campaign co-op are the two features that give this a shelf life past the campaign, and co-op splits naturally along the two layers: one player manages the hole, one player runs the war. Where it disappoints is the surface half. The overworld RTS is competent and nothing more. Unit variety is thin next to the dungeon roster, the tactical options come down to positioning a blob and remembering to retreat, and after a dozen missions I was rushing those segments to get back downstairs. Hero AI underground is also readable to a fault. Once you have learned the pathing preferences, you can build the same funnel-and-trap shape on nearly every map and it keeps working, which drains tension out of the back half of the campaign. And the mission length is a genuine barrier. There is real friction in committing an evening to a map you might have lost structurally in the first fifteen minutes without knowing it. If you cannot sit still for that, no amount of good room design will save the experience for you. On the newcomer question, though, I would push back on the intimidation factor. This is a far softer landing than it looks. The campaign introduces mechanics one system at a time rather than dumping a full economy on you in mission one, everything is real-time but forgiving enough that you can stop and think, and controller support is complete enough that this genuinely plays from a couch, which is rare for anything in this genre. If you have never touched a dungeon builder, treat the first three missions as a paid tutorial, accept that you will lose one map to a badly placed treasury, and go in with the mindset that your first dungeon is a draft. The skill ceiling is in layout planning, not in mechanical execution, so nothing here is gated behind reflexes. That combination, deep planning with low input demands, is exactly what I want out of a sim, and it is why I would hand this to a strategy-curious friend before I handed them anything from Paradox.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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