Dungeons 3
Through enticing the dark elf priestess Thalya from the fluffy clutches of the surface world to become his chief lieutenant, the Dungeon Lord has found a way to direct his campaign of conquest from the confines of his underground lair. With Thalya on the front line, and the united forces of evil to support her, players will have to use every trick in the book to best those do-gooders of the overworld, once and for all! Unleash your dark side by creating a unique underground dungeon from a huge array of rooms, traps and structures. Raise the most terrifying army the world has ever seen, by choosing from despicable creatures such as orcs, succubae, zombies and much, much more. Then, once you have built your forces, emerge from the darkness and guide your army to the light of the overworld, where you will corrupt the land and dispatch anything even vaguely heroic, cute or unicorn-shaped.
Steam User 73
There's a guy in top rated reviews complaining on how close the camera is. If you go into the game settings you can set the camera distance to far, which helps a lot with managing your units and your dungeon (you can see up to 4 rooms at the same time). That might be useful to you.
I'm coming from Dungeons 2, and first of all I'll say Dungeons 3 is overall a good game. Sometimes I wish the narrator would shut the fuck up but other than that it's your standard Dungeons experience.
If you're expecting a base builder + tower defense, this game might not be for you. The game is more of an RTS than tower defense, and the game loop can be defined as:
Get your economy going -> pump out units -> secure resources on the surface -> get a better economy for better units.
The units feel really cool to use, and compared to Dungeons 2, this game encourages you to find a build you like and stick with it, while experimenting during the earlier levels so that you can min-max for yourself. A good rule of thumb is to try to accomplish all the side objectives in missions, as this way you are forced to improve your build and maximize your economy.
You should get it on a sale, as of this review, Dungeons 4 is 2 months until release, so this is something you can play while waiting for the next iteration of the franchise.
Additionally, if you want my build (Dungeons 2 playstyle build) that can pretty much get you through every scenario and get every side objective, here you go:
1. Discard everything that isn't orcs and make your food camp twice as big
2. 5-7 Snots (do not purchase military units until you reach this snot number or you get attacked)
3. Get 5 Orcs
4. Upgrade military population limit
5. Get 2 nagas
6. Go out into the world (take everyone with you) to secure 1-2 evil sources
7. Keep pumping snots until you reach 10
8. With the evil you've got, improve your military population to 7
9. Get one orc and one naga and attach them to your surface military
10. Once you have enough evil, get an almanac (6x6) and research naga healing upgrade
11. Get the simple spells upgrade ASAP, as the teleport spell you get with it is the most efficient way to defend your dungeon while you're out in the world
12. From this point on, you should adapt your build to the current objective needs, but the 6 orcs + 3 naga + Thalya can tank an absurd amount of damage and nagas make your orcs practically immortal. As an extra, you might want to turn off Thalya's fireball autocasting (right click the icon, it should stop glowing green) so that you can manual cast, and maximize your damage + area
Steam User 30
This game is very much in the style of Dungeon Keeper or Evil Genius, so planning your base to include hallways is a must. Rooms cannot touch and are less efficient if they aren't enclosed by walls and a door. Multiple doors is perfectly fine.
Invading Heroes will head straight for your Dungeon Heart, stopping to wreck shit on the way. You can quite easily make a circuitous path that will heavily delay them, like most tower defense style games.
Traps work extremely well, to the point where you won't need defenders at all, but will wear down over time and must be replaced. Orcs and Goblins are the only units that can build them.
Eventually you will get access to a Graveyard, Prison, and Guard Room. You can throw defeated Heroes into the Graveyard or Prison to turn them into Zombies or Skeletal Archers, respectively. Both of these units are best suited to guard duty, as they're sorta shitty on the overworld, but as undead, they auto resurrect if they die.
Every map has at least one Diamond node in it. This is an infinite resource for money. If you just want to play around and make the fanciest dungeon possible, you can.
Titan units don't take up space in your unit limit. Titans also require a 4x4 space for their bunk.
A few room types work well next to each other. Workshop, Tinkerer's Cave, Arcanium, Chamber of Relaxation, and Sinister Laboratory. Those rooms make and use the same resources in some combination, so the less time your Little Snots have to run around, the better.
Similarly, putting the Prison as close to where Heroes tend to die is ideal, as the Little Snots spend less time dragging them in it.
Conversely, the Lecture Hall can be in the ass end of your dungeon, as there are no resources required and no workers needed in it. Save prime real estate for something useful.
F2 picks up every combat unit in your dungeon. Holding down right mouse will drop them all at once.
Holding down left mouse when casting a spell will charge it up to increase the duration or power.
Getting the Evil generating points on the overworld sooner rather than later is probably a good idea.
In the build menu, if you hover over the icon for a room or trap, the tool-tip will tell you almost everything you need to know about it. For rooms, this will include the size of any equipment that is required for it to function, whether the equipment is automatically built or requires player intervention and how much stuff it can store per tile (if applicable).
Fun, funny game
Steam User 12
The game is very entertaining. It has a sense of achievement and struggle, yet it still feels relaxing. If you have played the game that influenced two similar games, one of which is Dungeons 3 (and the prequels), you will recognise some elements. What differentiates this game from Dungeon Keeper is that it can be played not only in the dungeon.
I’m currently playing the campaign on normal. I’m a bit slow in RTS, and I always have been. With age, the issue with RTS games has become a disadvantage for me. However, this game works well for me as the pacing isn’t really fast or demanding, at least not in the campaign. The skirmish mode is a completely different story.
The narration is very funny and makes remarks on other games or popular culture references. During the game, the narrator also says funny things, making the game fun to play and entertaining as well. Some of the things said by the narrator made me laugh out loud! The campaign is fun, and the gameplay is fluid and appealing. The chapter animations are awesome! I like the transition between the dungeon and the overworld. I also enjoy researching and planning the dungeon as it should be.
What I don’t like is the lack of some features when managing the troops. You can’t deselect already selected troops, and when you pick up all your minions with F2, there’s no way (as far as I know) to cancel that except by placing all of them somewhere. I also wish there were an easier way of prioritizing the current tasks of the snots. Even though I assign them to the toolbox machine and have a grunt assigned to the tinkerer machine, they still refuse to produce the things I need for my traps. There should perhaps be a “lock to” feature that you have to manually unlock to pick the unit up, as I mentioned with F2 earlier. The game is very zoomed in, even at the most zoomed out. This can be changed in the settings!
20230923 (or September 23, 2023): I’ve completed the campaign now with mixed impressions. The last mission bugged out on me, and the constant spawning of groups of heroes almost ruined my day. As with skirmish games, they just happen to spawn each time I attempt to leave my dungeon!
But on the whole, it was a fun experience, and the time spent on the campaign was well worth it. However, seeing the skirmish games acknowledge my lack of skill in RTS games because I’m just too slow, I don’t think I’ll play the game more. The remaining achievements are also out of my grasp.
Steam User 8
Oh how I miss the days of old, where building a dungeon was as easy as clicking a button only to have a throng of imps rushing forth eager to dig out a new treasury for your’s truly. Dungeons 3 is simply a nice reimagining of its granddad Dungeon Keeper in the same way Doom: Eternal is the natural conclusion to Commander Keen, everything cranked up to 11..
The story is blatantly ripped from the soggy fandom pages of Warcraft's most ludicrous lore. We follow our anti-hero Thalia, a perky dark-elf that had some falling out with her paladin father and now runs rampant across the kingdom facing various Warcraft-knockoffs on a quest to domination.
The gameplay is split into two parts. The meticulous building of a dark foreboding dungeon filled with traps, libraries and torture chambers is chill, meditating and quite soothing. The other part is the rampaging rudimentary point and click RTS-game that takes place in the overworld where objectives must be met, heroes vanquished and zones captured to gain more evil currency. All in all neither of the two games are bad but personally I found it staggeringly hard to concentrate on both at once so when I brought a partner in for some jolly cooperation (and fundamentally a division of labor!) the game truly clicked for me. One thing that bothered me a bit though was that all the previous locked stuff never truly was brought back and there is a bit too much linearity campaign wise for me to truly enjoy.
Now the humor is crude and quite on the nose with a lot of fourth wall breaking and although some parts were fine, others were a bit too much. I don't mind silly humor, at all, but when it gets in the way of my immersion there is such a thing as too much.. Also this game wants to poke fun at Warcraft so much that it fails to give me a proper world to invest in, there are modest homages, then there is this.. The graphics are fine, nothing fancy yet cartoony enough to be endearing and the cutscenes look like something out of a 90s cartoon so I guess that might be fitting? In the end I played through it all and had a blast of a time.
Get it cheap and try it out, if you have a friend interested in some blatant overworld rampage, the better! So.. yea?
Steam User 13
A german game with a very, veeery specific sense of german humour
Steam User 5
God I love these games and series takes me back to dungeon keeper times..
I am so happy they made these games. can't wait till 4. is out. already did some missions there too :D so funny
Steam User 6
Thalya best EVIL Night Elf Waifu. 11/10