When I heard the premise for the game Dungeons, I was really excited. Playing a Dungeon Master who designs dungeons specifically with the goal of luring in heroes before gleefully and maliciously murdering them for your own gain is an awesome concept. It's great to be running the show! And I really wanted to love this game. Really, really wanted to love it. Unfortunately, some of the cumbersome game mechanics made this game a really hard sell and less of the gleeful hero torturing marathon I was hoping for.

Dungeons starts you off controlling your most trusted minion, allowing you to get a feel for controlling a character through first person view. You get to walk around the dungeon, trying to get down to your lord to give him some important news. As you do, you realize that you've been under a spell and the game switches you to third person view, which is really the way the game is played easiest though you can switch back if you like. After a brief intro the game begins in earnest, with your Dungeon Lord escaping betrayal. Don't worry about the game being spoiled; the betrayal is simply the mechanic for setting up the rest of the game in which you learn how to design and build dungeons to lure in greedy heroes.

The first 'prologue' level of the game is extremely hectic and frantic. Characters are thrown into a fully formed dungeon without any real indicator what to do besides 'escape'. It takes a little bit of time to get more comfortable with the controls, but I was actually able to get my Dungeon Lord out and into relative safety. Here is where the game really begun. After being transported to a brand new dungeon, the game informed me that I needed to rebuild my power by working through a series of dungeons designed to help me build back up to my former glory. In each new dungeon I was presented with a main goal to accomplish as well as a series of smaller mini tasks.

The game is built around the concept of dungeon creating. Dungeon Lords need Prestige, which they gain by using Soul Energy to buy Prestige items. Prestige helps to complete objectives and it also fulfills the requirements for your various dungeon items. Your dungeon items are what you use to populate your realm. There are piles of gold, armory items and traps to name a few. You need these items to gain soul energy from your heroes. Are we starting to see a roundabout circuit here? Everything is incredibly intertwined in the game meaning that you'd better learn to manage your resources pretty quickly.

But simply put, when heroes come into your dungeon they want to be happy. They want the things in there that make the quest worthwhile for them. Some want to find gold, some want to beat monsters up, some want to trigger traps and some just want to sit down in some long lost library and soak up all sorts of knowledge. As their needs are fulfilled, they gain soul energy. In order to get that soul energy from them, you must defeat them and either put them in a cell or torture chamber to continue to leech it from them.

At certain times in the game, gathering Soul Energy became troublesome. The juggling act became a multi-tiered one man show where I was trying to figure out which items to buy and which resources to try to gather. While doing this, the player is presented with other objectives, many of them timed. These give the Dungeon Lord other things to do besides minding his dungeon, but it means that at times you feel rushed to complete an objective when you would rather be improving your dungeon.

As the game is played the Dungeon Lord does level up and gain the ability to pick up spells and increased attributes and skills which make can make him a badass fighting machine. But the first mention that I had gained points came in the very beginning of the game. I'd gained one skill point and one attribute point. Immediately afterwards, the game had me rushing to complete a mini objective that if I didn't complete, my game would end. And there were no other mentions that I could level up. I had to just 'know' to constantly check and level up as I went along. Granted, you do get a little line that pops up to tell you that you've completed a mini objective (which gives you skill and talent points), but there is no other in game indication for you to go spend the points. There is only one line that I found in the instruction manual that states that you can freely spend the points. The game itself doesn't do a good job of pointing it out to you.

While playing, the game does try to inform you of other important items, such as where to find the new dungeon items that have been unlocked for usage. The game is actually designed so that with each level new objects and new mechanics get added in, such as different hero types. And while it was interesting that the game was constantly expanding, it felt almost like the expansion was too fast. I'd play a level, get used to the new things they'd handed my way and would feel awesome. I'd be ready to tackle the new level with all sorts of new ideas and tricks only to find that I know had to adjust to brand new things being thrown my way. It seemed like there was no real room to get comfortable with what you'd just finished learning about before they wanted you to learn something new. And players need to make sure that they read the instruction manual in order to know what all the interfaces on the screen mean. The game points out some of the interfaces, but leaves out very important ones such as a button that lets you assign tasks to your goblins.