Every single character constantly remarks about other pop culture franchises, and to the fact that they are fictional characters in a video game named Dungeons 3. The Narrator (voiced by Kevan Brighting, who also narrated The Stanley Parable) gives long monologues about his personal life. Thalya frequently argues with her “good” self, who still wants to protect people. Problem is, the comedy often falls flat, and there’s way too much of it. It’s refreshing for a title to take a completely comedic approach. This is not a bad thing there’s enough gritty, violent medieval fantasy games out there. If this sounds like a grim premise for a game, fret not, because Dungeons 3 doesn’t even try to take itself seriously. Set in a medieval fantasy world, the story follows Thalya, a dark elf mage raised by humans who finds that she is genetically predisposed to evil, and proceeds to destroy her home and begin a quest to rule the world. It takes a while in each level to reach this synchronicity, but once you reach it, you feel like the powerful stubborn demon lord the game wants you to be. The busywork takes care of itself, giving you time to deal with the objectives outside. Your minions are able to take care of themselves in the dungeon as long as you provide the gold and resources for them to do so – and that’s great. Once I’d recruited enough units to cycle in and out of the dungeon, and had traps laying in wait for unsuspecting heroes, I was able to have a lot of fun. While this reset feels tedious at the start of every level, it allowed me to design my dungeons according to the level’s objectives. There’s no pause button in the game, so this just resulted in me not caring about this system.Įvery level starts with a blank slate, requiring you to build your dungeon and recruit your minions from scratch. It’s hard to know which units to send back out, because everyone moves of their own accord in the dungeon, so you’re stuck scrambling around finding a creature just to check what their stats are.
Due to the different control schemes, you can only check these stats when you move your cursor over a unit, only while they’re in the dungeon. But the Army menu that gives an overview of all your units only displays these stats when they’re close to empty. Creatures can’t stay topside for too long, because they’ve each got a hunger and sleep stat that can only be replenished by returning to the dungeon. It’s more confusing that it needs to be, on multiple levels. Some menus are operated with the left stick, some are with the right stick. The construction menu requires tabbing between radials to find what you want, with the order of the tabs not being visible to you. On console, all options are relegated to multiple large radial menus that take up the entire screen.
In the PC version of the game, crafting and creature management happens on a neat panel that slides out from the side of the screen. It quickly became clear to me that Dungeons 3 was probably designed for a mouse-and-keyboard control scheme. Therefore, battles in the overworld solely consist of selecting your entire group, telling them to walk up to enemies, and letting the AI handle the rest. It’s easy enough to select your units and tell them where to move, but specifically selecting one over the other is impossible when they’re standing next to each other. I didn’t enjoy this as much as the dungeon building aspect, mostly because I didn’t have as much control over it. Each level has multiple objectives, most of which involve destroying something in the overworld. Above ground, you control your minions as they wreak havoc across the brightly-coloured countryside.