Dungeons 3

It's taken three entries in this real-time strategy series to finally get the formula right, but unfortunately the whole is lesser than the sum of its parts. Whereas Dungeons 1 was focused on dungeon management, Dungeons 2 infused more real-time strategy elements. Dungeons 3 scoops up all the ideas that have been tried to date and attempts to refine them. The now-familiar basics are still present and on display here: You build a staggering variety of rooms to fortify your dungeon and set traps to make it terrifying for invading heroes to navigate. You also patrol the topside, doing plenty of invading yourself. At times, even though these are both hallmarks of the series, it can frequently feel like two generic, confusing, and repetitive smaller games bolted onto each other. There may not be a nice way to say this, but any of those complaints by themselves would make the whole thing more tolerable. As it is, the game in general is a slog that actually seems to take pride in being generic.

Although the inclusion of a tutorial helps matters somewhat, there's no getting around the fact that managing what you're supposed to be doing and the requisite flow chart of what to construct in order to do that is simply befuddling to series newcomers. It may be unreasonable to expect the third entry in a series to generously extend lots of help, but you can easily get lost even on these tutorials -- which doesn't bode well for the rest of the game's sizable campaign. This is further complicated by what the game gets right: The difficulty has been raised, and there are double the maps, more room types, more creature types, and extensive skills and technologies (about 80) to balance. The inclusion of multiplayer skirmish and sandbox modes may actually be a better way of getting your bearings than the campaign, though it's really saying something about the overall experience when not dealing with the majority of the content included in here is more appealing. For all the game's forced attempts at humor, there's very little here to charm or invite you deeper in. It might have gotten the formula right here, but the series is arguably still finding its legs.