Dungeon Lords (2005)

Since it’s the UK version we are reviewing here, and most of the problems from the USA release have been fixed I think I’m being fair in the score I’ve awarded.

A slew of noticeably missing features and other problems may well end up drawing too much of your attention away from the game's good parts.

Dungeon Lords had a lot of potential. The world is sparse and hard to navigate through, but at the same time feels oddly warm and interesting.

The lack of detail and polish simply killed this game.

You can go bargain-bin diving and come up with a better purchase for five dollars than this disaster, so do yourself a favor and take that option. [July 2005, p.125]

A mess of a game. Buggy, incomplete and all together boring, it's a huge disappointment for fans that are starving for a fun role-playing game on the PC that doesn't require a fast Internet connection.

Dungeon Lords is a disaster.

After few hours of playing this game I stuck because of map, which was an abomination... navigation was impossible !!

Played Dungeon Lords - Steam Edition. I haven't played the earlier versions but I continuously got stuck on objects and enemies, the Athletics skill had no effect, despite the manual saying it should. For a game that tries to be movement based, the game play is pretty poor, kind of 'bump' fighting. Essentially, still a hunk of crap. Poor people who played the earlier versions if this game actually used to be worse.

This is a bad game that strangely has a few things going for it, mostly good intentions that were turned into terrible implementations. For example, the chest opening system seems interesting at first, until you realise that absolutely any single one of them is trapped, and that opening them triggers the apparition of random monsters. Playing a thief is therefore useless. The identification system also seems promising, but actually functions with a quit/load routine. By the way, the Load is outside the menu, so you have to quit the game first. Yes, it is bizarre. Another example ? Character creation offers a large choice of races, of which however only two allow you to play a female. One more ? The mini-map is clear and seems very fine, until you see that it's overloaded (it even keeps track of destroyed crates.) And then you discover that there is no general map, just when you are totally lost. What's worse, combat is non-stop and inevitable. Hit and run tactics only add new enemies into the fray, because random encounters occur every other step. The opponents are completely stupid, but quantity makes them deadly anyway. The result is so unbalanced that rats are dangerous while an enormous ogre is too easy to kill. There is also a revival function, which is useless since you can just reload a game. Other offenders are bad voice acting, dreadful dialogue content, annoyingly repetitive merchants, object by object sales, lack of labels on spells and items, et cætera, et cætera. Frankly too many to enumerate.