Thank you Kalypso Media Digital for sending us this game to review!

The Ultimate Evil, having been cut off from taking physical form (like Sauron), maintains his influence over his avatar the Dark Elf Thalya. Thalya seeks a means to return the Ultimate Evil to his physical form but is constantly opposed in this evil endeavor by her goody-two-shoes stepbrother Tristan. Tristan, who is still somewhat miffed at Thalya for killing his father Tanos in the previous game and seeks to resurrect him. So begins Dungeons 4’s humorous and fantasy-reference-filled story. Such references include direct, nearly copyright infringing allusions such as “Gorgu” the Little Snot, Tanos and the reforging of the “Gauntlet of Finitude”, and the “Stones of Finitude.” Beyond these overt references, Tristan makes several rousing speeches early on that are nearly verbatim quotes from the Lord of the Rings trilogy and other fantasy literature or films.

As in Dungeons III, Dungeons 4 plays like a typical real-time strategy game (RTS) with a top-down view of both the overworld and the underworld. The overworld is where Tristan sets up camp and dispatches heroes to invade your dungeon. The underworld is where you build your dungeon, digging out halls and chambers with your industrious Little Snots, mining gold, and sending forth your minions to assault the overworld. In many ways, Dungeons 4 plays very much like its predecessor, but it makes numerous small changes, most of which I wish they would not have made.

First, in Dungeons III, the resource called “evil” was generated over time when you corrupted a source of “good” on the overworld. In Dungeons 4 the primary way to collect “evil” is to gather it deliberately by defeating a “good” creature in the overworld, destroying one of Tristan’s hero camps, or intercepting a caravan of some sort in the overworld which will spawn at various times throughout the scenario. This made gathering evil a little less passive, which I don’t mind so much per se. “Evil” is used to research many things, so it is something you do have to deliberately farm if you want to research the higher-tier rooms and units. Another improvement I like was a change in how many units you can have. In Dungeons III, the unit cap was typically around 20. In Dungeons 4’s later game scenarios, you can have 40 units if you research all the unit-increasing upgrades you can.

There are other units that do not take up unit slots but are limited independently. These are Little Snots, Zombies, and Converted Heroes. They removed the titan units from Dungeons III in this installment, which was disappointing.

The change I like least from Dungeons III was that they removed the practical value of the units by having the Little Snots do all the work. In Dungeons III, almost every unit had a secondary function beyond killing stuff in the overworld. Goblins would work the workshop, trolls would brew ale, some of the demons would farm mana for spells, etc. In Dungeons 4, the only worker unit is the Little Snot, so while that frees up your fighting units to go overworld and gather evil, or defend the dungeon, that also means when they’re not doing one of those things, they’re just cooling their heels. I like my horde better when they aren’t so lazy.

I did not encounter any buggy behavior or poor scripting in Dungeons 4 which was very encouraging. Overall, the graphics in Dungeons 4 are on par with, or maybe a little upscaled from, Dungeons III. The creatures are nicely detailed, and their animations are smooth.

A critique of mine from Dungeons 3 persists in Dungeons 4, which is a little disappointing as well. I feel like there remains a diminished strategic element in the combat system. Combat in this game is largely centered around assembling a mob, telling them to go where you want, watching as they either kill stuff or get defeated, and moving them again. In some encounters against the powerful creatures that you need to farm for “evil” the creature would broadcast their attacks so you would need to move your units out of the area of effect, then have them attack again, but that is the extent of the strategy needed.

On the moral score, Dungeons 4 scored slightly higher than its predecessor for the following reasons: The Succubus Demon is now wearing more clothing than in Dungeons III and no longer actively tortures heroes in a sado-masochistic fashion. The torture chamber process is no longer how Hero units are converted to your side. Torturing heroes generates “evil” instead, which actually seems more appropriate to me. Thalya’s outfit, while not revealing, is still provocative in nature. Pentagrams are still seen in structures, architecture and the spell menu. You can sacrifice units (yours or fallen enemies) at the undead temple, but this doesn’t give you a reward as it did previously. While I didn’t count, I felt that Dungeons 4 had more instances of bad language than did Dungeons III.

Overall, I enjoyed Dungeons 4 as much as I enjoyed Dungeons III. It is humorous with an entertaining story and a pithy narrator. Par for the course, I love all the references to other fantasy literature. I also feel that the subtext of the prototypically “good” self-righteous Paladin becoming even more evil than the “Ultimate Evil” to be a reinforcement of the truly tongue-in-cheek nature of this comedic story-driven RTS game.

-OrionStar1979