Dungeon Overlord: Enslave Your Useless Facebook Friends
By Remko Molenaar (Proxzor), OnRPG Journalist
Have you ever dreamed of ruling your own realm with little sinister minions that will do everything for you? Dungeon Overlord lets you take command of all sorts of minions that will help you conquer the world. These evil minions will help you forge a powerful dungeon realm and will expand your power globally. But keep your whip and gold handy, because good hired help can be hard to find and tough to keep. I got the chance to try out this game by NightOwl Games and this is how it goes.
You started off with a bunch of tutorial quests that help build up your realm with multiple minions. This is where you quickly and painlessly learn the ins and outs of the game. You will build many useful structures such as the Den where your minions will rest and sleep, the library to research new technologies and other rooms that will help you get some resources or more specialized minions. These quests will give you lots of experience points and resources to keep expanding and thus will keep you occupied for a while. Because this game is a real time empire building strategy game everything that you will make or research in Dungeon Overlord will take real time for it to finish. It will first start off in small numbers but the more you play this game the longer it will take for projects to finish. As is the case with most Facebook games, the wait eventually reaches hours before projects reach completion. Because of my busy life I left this game for a few days and when I came back my minions where on strike! What happened was I ran out of resources and they didn’t receive their payments so they went on strike until I had enough of gold to pay them back. Since gold will slowly regain upon the surface which you can pick up for yourself you can easily get your minions back to work and as any evil overlord will attest there never is a real issue with minions pretending to unionize.
After the tutorial is done you will have to go your own way and various choices open up the diversity available in your lair. You will still receive quests that will help you out but you can totally ignore them if you want. Since the quests give experience and resources I went on with them since fast accumulation of resources is vital to anything you do. The amount of resources you have are easily seen above your screen under the experience bar where you can also see your level. I had to upgrade my farm which took multiple minutes but I could speed it up. It is nothing new that empire builder RPG’s try to make money so you can speed things up, and like any other game you can also speed up your researches and building projects with Dungeon Marks. These Dungeon Marks cost real money and can be bought via Facebook.
Conclusion
Throughout the game you will unlock more and more content so Dungeon Overlord will keep you occupied for a while. Because this game is a browser game made for Facebook anyone with Internet Access (aka you) can play this game. Although slow in the beginning, Dungeon Overlord really picks up once your facilities are established, and I am currently hooked at this game. I believe it is a nice time waster to keep you occupied for several hours a day. It also features an anonymous and quite robust chat system which really plays into some awesome alliance systems, though I stuck mostly to the single player side of the game. If you like ruling your own realm and having minion slaves do your work I would advise you to try this game since it stands out nicely from the mobs of wanna-bes in the Facebook market.
