Dungeons 4, now on Game Pass, combines Warcraft and Dungeon Keeper in a deliciously evil package

polygon.com:

The Dungeon Keeper franchise can feel like a relic from a bygone era. While titles like War for the Overworld and Evil Genius 2 have carried its spirit of evil middle management into the modern era, developer Realmforge Studios has combined aspects of the underworld management sim and blended them with real-time strategy elements for the fourth entry in its Dungeons franchise, which came out in November 2023 and is now on Xbox Game Pass.

Dungeons 4 follows a campaign composed of 20 missions that typically begin in your underground lair, as you put together the necessary infrastructure to house your minions and defend against unwanted intruders. However, once you’ve firmly rooted yourself underground and assembled an army, you can head topside to pillage resources, kill some would-be heroes, and generally engage in activity that would earn you more than a few points of bad karma, effectively shifting the gameplay from a management sim to an RTS.

The gameplay in Dungeons 4 can feel similar to Dungeon Keeper while you wait for enemies to shuffle to your doorstep and fall into your clever maw of traps. However, each map in Dungeons 4 is effectively two maps layered on top of each other, divided into underworld and overworld, which are linked by a series of portals that conveniently become choke points to attack or defend. This encourages you to adopt a more aggressive play style by locking away key resources on your enemies’ turf, and feels like a natural evolution of the management-heavy Keeper.

Dungeon Keeper offered you indirect control over your minions — you could drop them near enemies, or direct them toward a certain point on the map — this made them unpredictable, and occasionally frustrating, as they wouldn’t always do what you needed them to. Dungeons 4 fixes this by simply giving you direct control over your minions via a familiar RTS-like interface while on the overworld map. You can right-click on enemies to attack them, assign command groups, and manage