EA’s Dungeon Keeper Mobile Is Another Nightmare

EA has recently released a rehashed version of the classic game Dungeon Keeper for Android and iOS. Unfortunately for consumers, this game is awful, I would even go as far as saying it is a shameful from a developmental direction. While the game itself is free to play, or I should say, free to download, the game is loaded with an absurd amount of micro transactions that only EA seems to be capable of.

After the extremely publicized Mass Effect 3 ending debacle, which included on release downloadable content, and their released of Fifa 2013 which was literally just a re-skin of Fifa 2012, they have clearly not learned from their mistakes. Dungeon Keeper is a fairly standard strategy game, but as you go throughout the game you essentially have two choices when you go on missions or have something you want to do. You can either wait obscene amounts of time for the task to be done, literally hours and hours of waiting, or you can buy resources from the EA store, which the game takes no shame of constantly reminding the player of. The following picture from the game is disturbingly analogous to the current EA model for their games.

A devil asks “who says money can’t buy time”. EA’s mission statement embodied.

One of the other reviews I read on this game astutely said that the main boss in this game is time. And it really is. Literally right after the tutorial of the game, the first area I tried to dig was met with a twenty four hour timer. Yes, you read that right, twenty four hours of waiting to dig ONE wall. But the best bit is you can rush the digging by spending gems, which of course are all available via micro transactions.

It is a truly unfortunate step for such a beloved franchise and my advice to you is that if you enjoyed the original Dungeon Keeper, just pretend that this does not exist.