The British Advertising Standards Authority ruled that EA's free-to-play mobile title Dungeon Keeper can not be advertised as such because of. Dungeon Keeper for iOS is a well-made mobile update of a classic. All this publication's reviews; Read full review; Pocket Gamer UK. Jan 31, 2014. It's not Dungeon Keeper, but Dungeon Keeper has enough going for it that it's worth a punt.

Bullfrog's strategy classic is reborn as a free-to-play Clash of Clans clone. Ouch.

Dungeon Keeper is a hard game to review. That's because any critique of this remake of Bullfrog's 1997 PC hit can't help but slide down the slippery slope towards being a critique of free-to-play gaming in general, and that's when people start banging the table and raising their voices and it all goes a bit Jeremy Kyle.

It is, at least, easy to see why EA revived this beloved cult classic in this fashion. Revisit the original Dungeon Keeper today and be amazed at just how many of its ideas have been reborn in mobile games. It was one of the first 'tower defence' games, for example, flipping gaming convention upside down by casting the player as an evil tyrant, crafting the most perfectly evil lair in which to trap and kill do-gooder enemies who enter your hallways looking to save the world.

You did this by using an expanding army of imps to dig out new rooms, which you could then use to house traps, treasure and monster-spawning hatcheries. The more you expanded your labyrinth, the more stuff you discovered. The more stuff you discovered, the more new things you could build. It was a near-perfect feedback loop of routine and invention.

And, credit where it's due, EA's Mythic studio has revived that gameplay style very accurately. The viewpoint is loftier, the art style more cartoony, but almost every feature from the 1997 game remains in place.

The big difference is that wherever there's a crack in the gameplay, EA has hammered in a wedge in the shape of a paywall. There are four currencies at play here, three of which are in-game - gold, rock and mana - and the inevitable gems which can be purchased with real money. Everything you do has an immediate cost counted in one of the first three currencies, and a countdown timer that can be swept away with the fourth.

Of course, of course, the economy is stacked in such a way that you're forever being steered towards the gems. Progress is impossible without upgrading your various rooms, and to do that you need gold or rock, your stockpiles of which have a finite ceiling that must be raised by upgrades. Upgrades which require gold or rock. By constantly ratcheting up the amounts required, the game creates an ingenious but ruthless domino effect. You need to level up your workshop, but to do that you need more rock than you can store, but upgrading your rock storage means saving up more gold than you can store, but upgrading that.. and so it goes on. The head bone, in this case, is connected to the wallet.

To give an example of how crudely this system has been implemented, upgrading your Dungeon Heart - the core of your lair - to Level 3 requires only a few thousand rocks. Getting it to Level 4, the cost rockets to 50,000. The ripple effect of upgrades needed so that your dungeon can even hold that much rock is ludicrous. Scroll through the rooms and traps yet to be unlocked, and you'll see the price of items heading north of seven figures.

The game does ease you in, at least, adhering to the classic dealer's mantra that the first taste is free. You're started with an area of soft ground to dig your first rooms out of, and the imps carve through it with familiar ease. Fill that space, however, and you must start mining the outer edge of the map, made up of gem veins that take between four hours and a full day to excavate a single square. Making space for a basic 3x3 space suddenly becomes a task that can literally take all week. Meanwhile the amount of gems mined from each square can be counted on your fingers, while every gem transaction costs in the hundreds.

'What we have here is the shell of Bullfrog's pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans.'

But there I go, reviewing the free-to-play business model rather than Dungeon Keeper. It's hard not to, though, when that business model is the only thing holding the game up. The tragedy isn't that EA has crammed micro-transactions into a beloved game - though that certainly stings - but that it has done so in such a rote and predictable way.

Let's be clear, again, because it bears constant repetition: free-to-play is not automatically a bad thing. There are plenty of examples of great games - hardcore PC games - that use micro-transactions, and do so while building an engaged and devoted fanbase. League of Legends. World of Tanks. Team Fortress 2. There are clearly better templates to follow.

Yet what we have here is the shell of Bullfrog's pioneering strategy game, hollowed out and filled up with what is essentially a beat-for-beat clone of Clash of Clans. Every function, every mechanism, every online feature has been tried and tested already by Supercell's money machine and EA is following behind, drooling like a Pavlovian dog. That's what stings the most: not that Dungeon Keeper has gone free-to-play, but that it's done so in such soulless fashion.

It's not for the faint-hearted.

The closest the game comes to its strategy roots is in the multiplayer aspects, which unlock once you've built a Training Room for your minion monsters. There are campaign levels that you can undertake by choice - both attacking AI dungeons and defending your own - but you'll also be open to invasion from other players. This would be great, if it weren't for the complete lack of consequence.

In the original game, defending your lair against enemies was literally life or death. If you failed, it was game over. There's no such thing as game over in free-to-play though, because when the game ends so too will the payments - so instead you'll find yourself opening the app to be told that someone attacked you. You may have lost some resources, which will be replaced in time, but whatever damage they did repairs itself instantly and you carry on with no real penalty. With such pitifully low stakes, and gameplay that values impatience over skill, there's only the most slender of gameplay threads to cling to.

Price and availability

• Free download from Google Play and iOS App Store

It's always tempting to write this sort of free-to-play title off by saying it's not really a game, and in a lot of ways it isn't. But it's Dungeon Keeper, and every now and then you see enough of that game to feel nostalgic, before it vanishes again behind a 24-hour cool down timer.

Let's be generous. Those glimpses of the game Dungeon Keeper used to be are enough to earn one point. You can have the rest for 800 gems.

1 /10

As I write this review, I am waiting for one of my imps to finish mining a block that I commanded it to start digging last night. It has hours left to go. Something so simple, something that took a handful of seconds in the original Dungeon Keeper, is taking me 24 hours in the twisted mobile reimagining.It started in the game's very tutorial. The grasping. The harassing. The demands for money. As I was being taught about how gems can speed up the building and excavating of dungeons, the game's narrator - a twee redesign of the once iconic Horned Reaper - openly mocked me, making fun of how 'polarizing' in-app purchases were before shamelessly telling me how spending my real money will grease the wheels and get things accomplished.

This is how it begun, and it only got worse from there.The first block I clicked on was going to take four hours to excavate with one of two imps I had. Not a problem, I had a bunch of gems already. I used them and sped up the process.

As I did for the next block. Then the next block. Then I had no more gems. I started trying to dig out a 4x4 room two nights ago.Two nights ago. And I am not finished digging out a 4x4 room.This is the long-awaited return of Dungeon Keeper, a game that hides behind the mask of 'free to play,' but couldn't even be called that. Golf championships 2020. It's free to wait, but not to play anything.

There's nothing to actually play. 'Playing,' in Dungeon Keeper consists of opening it up when you remember once a day, poking a few things on the screen, then closing it down and finding something else to do for anywhere between four and twenty-four hours.The original Dungeon Keeper was a masterclass in creating engaging strategy sims.

With its dark humor, simple interface, and challenging need for balance and maintenance, it was an easy classic, and one I still happily play today. The acquisition of power, the satisfaction in attracting and keeping hordes of varied monsters, lay at the very heart of the game's appeal. None of that appeal can be found in this perverted farce. How can one gain any satisfaction from a game like this? The constant acquisition of gold and stone from mines (you can't dig gold out of the map yourself anymore, that would be too much like gameplay) means nothing when the real currency of the game is gems, and the acquiring of gems isn't satisfying because you just buy them with real cash. There's no joy to be had here, no feeling like you've done anything worthwhile. You either spend your way to the top or spend hours upon hours collecting things of zero value.Even if it weren't propped up pathetically on in-app purchases, this is a lame and pitiful excuse for a Dungeon Keeper game.

The map is small, progress is linear and predetermined for you (nothing to discover here, no secrets to find or a huge bestiary to attract), and doing battle against others is facilitated by a separate, stripped-down Tower Defense style game that lasts a few seconds and holds little strategic challenge. The major draws of the original titles are nowhere to be found. The dungeon doesn't feel like a living, breathing thing. It's a static, quiet place, where boredom reigns supreme.There are cursory nods to the original. You have a dungeon heart, from which you summon monsters, though summoning is manual and you really only need monsters for the segregated battle mode. You build rooms to attract more monsters, but there's nothing of the original game's variety, and the manual nature of summoning means you don't get that old feel of a natural, spontaneous world. You slap imps - on a separate imp-slapping screen - which makes them allegedly work more efficiently for a modest amount of time, though the time it takes them to do anything is so vast, there's no observable difference.

These limp-limbed gestures toward the old games, however, really only serve to betray how contemptuous the rest of the 'game' is.I'm a big defender of most games - even ones I hate - when somebody says they're 'not a game.' The accusation of something not being a game is a blinkered and often weak form of noncommittal criticism.

In the case of Dungeon Keeper, however, I can find no defense. It isn't a game.

Titanfall wiki. It's a cynically fabricated cash delivery system. Like Square Enix's equally disgusting Final Fantasy: All the Bravest, all that Mythic has done is take a property with prestige, and squander its good reputation on a grotesque cash grab, a 'game' designed to provide absolutely nothing to the player while clawing as much coin as it can before those playing realize exactly how barren the husk they've invested in is.This certainly isn't Dungeon Keeper. With its babyish character designs, threadbare interactivity, and miserable begging for cash, it's FarmVille for even bigger suckers. It's bad even by the usual standards of mobile 'free to wait' games.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out let you do at least a bit more before launching its psychological warfare on you. Dungeon Keeper wastes no time in attacking the player with its harassment for cash. It can't wait to employ its focus-tested blitzkrieg of harassment and mental waylaying. From the very outset, its heartless endgame is communicated clearly - it wants your money, and it wants you to give it that money in exchange for nothing. Even worse, it actively laughs at you while it pries open your wallet, cracking self-aware jokes - it makes fun of in-app purchases, then assails you with them anyway.

Because fuck you.I'm at a zero tolerance for games like this. When there are good free-to-play games out there, games that get your money by offering enjoyable experiences first and worrying about your cash later, there's no excusing the kind of unimaginative, lazy system that actively bars the user from playing without paying an increasingly exorbitant toll. Holding the game hostage is about as low as it gets, and I have no choice but to consider any developer that does it the very worst of hacks. This is a hack move by Mythic, and whether it had any agency in Dungeon Keeper's design, or executives on high mandated it, all involved should be ashamed of themselves.

This is shameful, and if anybody's proud of the horrible thing, they deserve nothing but scorn for being so pleased about actively contributing to the continued long-term harm such short-sighted and damaging games will do to this industry. This business model, built entirely on aggressively exploiting a bubble before it bursts, can bring nothing but illness toward an already unhealthy market.That's Dungeon Keeper. One of the worst examples of a cancer that is eroding the market and has already destroyed the credibility of the once promising mobile gaming sector. Even worse, it's taken a beloved series and dragged its name cruelly through the mud. Things don't get much more reckless, shameless, and spineless than this. I hate everything about Dungeon Keeper for mobile, from the ground up.Bottom Line: A cynically motivated skeleton of a non-game, a scam that will take your cash and offer nothing in return.

A perversion of a respected series, twisted by some of the most soulless, selfish, and nauseating human beings to ever blight the game industry.Recommendation: War for the Overworld is on Steam and, at $21.99, will cost less than what Dungeon Keeper wants off you long-term.