Sometimes, it is good to be bad.

I say this as someone who has gone through multiple playthroughs of games and still couldn’t bring myself to be a bad person in any of them. Mass Effect saw me as the pure paragon determined to unite the galaxy against the Reaper menace no matter what, Dragon Age cast me as the wise-cracking mage out to prove that there are good spellcasters in the world, and in Heavy Rain I was the distraught father who would do anything necessary to save his son. I am that guy who plays a paladin in Dungeons and Dragons and finds it easy to always do the right thing. I even prefer Superman to Batman – that’s how much of a goodie-goodie I am.

But even I sometimes need to let my hair down and attempt to enslave and dominate the masses and War for the Overworld is a great chance to do just that. Dark caverns filled with gold. Goblin and undead minions to dig out my tunnels and slay my enemies. Heroes to slaughter simply because I can.

Ever since our boy Paul managed to wrangle an interview out of the developers last week at EGX, I was looking forward to getting my hands on this game, which is still in very early access beta at the moment. Dungeon Keeper is a long standing favourite of my wife’s and just from watching her play it over the years I’ve seen why it has a fair bit of nostalgia attached to it for so many players around the world. It spares no opportunity to turn the usual “Good vs. Evil” formula on its head and let you cause chaos across the world in an effort to expand your evil empire, but it also has always had very balanced gameplay and straight forward interface that made it easy to dive straight in and get your evil on, making it perfect for veterans and beginners alike to enjoy. It is bright and colourful and charming in its dedication to being the same game we’ve played for years but told from a different point of view. Like Wicked, but with less singing and more dominatrices.

The beta plays about as well as you would expect from a game that only has nothing more specific than “2015” listed as its release date. It is choppy and buggy at times (I never could get the damn menu to stay open long enough for me to click anything) and it feels very limited in scope. However, what is present feels like it has a lot of potential. There might not be much of a plot, but I have never really needed much plot in order to enjoy a good bit of defence strategy.

War for the Overworld straddles a fine line between homage to the Dungeon Keeper legacy and straight up copy of a proven formula and it is hard to say which way it will go until we get further along in the beta. At the moment, the similarities are striking and almost distracting. The interface is similar, as is the art style and camera angle. They even got Richard Ridings, the guy who was the narrator from the original, to provide the voice over in the tutorial. It is very easy to think you’re playing a remake of the Dungeon Keeper franchise rather than a true standalone game. The plus side to this is that it gives you a sense of where the game has come from right from the very beginning. If ever the term “spiritual successor” was appropriate, I think it would be here. The down side of this is that the game currently lacks a real sense of who it is outside of “that game that is a lot like Dungeon Keeper”. It is certainly lacking in the charm department at the moment, but I have to believe that there will be many a developer meeting to discuss how the game can harness the kind of off-beat humour that made the original so endearing.

How well it succeeds is going to depend on how well developer Subterranean Games handles the balance between pleasing fans of the old games (which they certainly count themselves among) and striking out into new territory. Again, this game is still in very early beta and it has a fair number of bugs and issues to sort out before it will truly have an identity of its own. But the little team have managed to put together an excellent looking game, giving us a chance to channel our inner demon in a healthy, constructive way. With a decent story and a solid array of minions to command to do my terrible, terrible bidding as well as some new bells and whistles to make the old school feel fresh, this could be a really successor to the Dungeon Keeper legacy.

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