If there’s one thing you can guarantee about a dungeon-based strategy game where you play as the bad guys, it’s the evil taking a backseat to humour. Yes, you may be in control of bloodthirsty monsters and slap your cute minions about to get them to work harder, but you’ve got a mentor whispering honey-voiced jokes into your ear and ridiculous dialogue breaks to lighten the mood.

Dungeons 4 is the latest in a series of games that takes this tradition to its absolute limit. From the beginning, it’s clear that the brand of evil we’re working with is ‘cartoonish’ - the tutorial levels joke about the mechanics, with the narrator directly referencing your character’s abilities and prompting you to use them to exterminate the goodies.

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Where Dungeon Keeper derives its humour from audacity and snark, and Evil Genius is totally over the top, Dungeons provides a cavalcade of references and fourth-wall breaks. Tonally, this does create a big divide between the horrendous slaughter you commit in the name of evil and the petty squabbling between the voiced characters, but it works. If these games were played straight, devoid of gags, you’d have something unpalatable and edgy on your hands. Creative director Christian Wolfertstetter thinks it could work but would appeal to a “completely different audience”.

Instead, Dungeons 4 flip flops elegantly between the ridiculous and the gruesome like a trapeze artist on an extremely bad day, perfectly appealing to the established audience. At the centre of the game’s humour is Thalya, the closest thing the game gets to a protagonist and main general of your army of evil. She makes threats of horrific violence to the do-gooders of the surface lands while having childish spats with her stepbrother, Tristan, who serves as her nemesis and foil. It’s a dynamic that works well - this is a rare dungeon-builder that features consistent characters that grow throughout the story, and erring on the comedic side is the right way to go. The darker, more caustic games work so well because you can stay distant from the carnage - here, you’re directly controlling Thalya and subject to her personal objectives. Making her a Saturday morning cartoon villain was the right choice.

This will all sound familiar to those who played Dungeons 3, and that’s by design. Dungeons 4 refines the previous game and is built on new code and past experience. The mechanics haven’t changed much - there’s still a split between RTS gameplay on the overworld and classic dungeon-building strategy underground, with lots of different rooms to build and creatures to recruit. It strikes a good balance between the two, and keeping an eye on both sides of the world at once is made simpler by the constant messages about intruders and the like. In many ways, it feels like a level pack and enhancement patch for the previous game, and that’s no bad thing.

I particularly love the emphasis on the differences between the three varieties of creatures you can recruit. Horde monsters, demons, and the undead all have different needs and qualities. If you’re so inclined, you can improve one camp to the detriment of the others, allowing you to forge a personal strategy rather freely. Whenever possible, I erred on the side of demonology, finding their creatures more fun to use, especially on long trips up in the overworld.

There are still a few kinks in the system, though. Some levels will limit how far you can go in terms of research but won’t tell you what the limits are, which can be frustrating. I found myself clicking the upgrade buttons multiple times, thinking I was under the effects of a bug rather than being limited by arbitrary barriers. It’s a minor quibble rooted in the early levels being an extended tutorial, though, and the rest of the game plays far more smoothly. Where I found Dungeons 3 to be a little on the unbalanced side, Dungeons 4 feels far better, and I’m convinced it will be one that sticks around.

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