Impire Review

The game begins with Oscar Van Fairweather; a buffoon of an evil sorcerer, summoning the once powerful Báal Abaddon onto the realm of Ardania. Oscar may have evil intentions but he is less of a leader and more of a follower. Knowing Báal’s power will be something to be feared he appoints himself as advisor to Báal and instructs him to start building himself an evil empire under the surface.

You take control of Báal as you build up a base under the surface of the world. Báal can be a proficient fighter after you have completed a few scenarios and evolved his abilities; eventually him in to one of three greater forms based around the Warrior, Commander or Wizard archetypes. While he can be killed; he does respawn after a brief time, ready to fight again. While dead you do lose access to all your spells; so you can’t replace workers or support your troops whilst dead.

The game is almost split between two views. You have the dungeon level camera with all the 3D models so you can watch what goes on and then you have the bird’s eye view looking down on markers representing the various rooms, squads and units of both yours own and the enemies. During the zoomed out view you can also access all of the building and the creature creation.

Both views offer the ability to order and teleport your squads around the maps; you also have access to room management in both views. The low level view is best used when in combat as it’s the only way to easily keep track of health bars outside of the squad menu. It’s also more precise so if you want to cast spells on specific units or assign marks to individual enemy units then you’ll have to do it here.

The bird’s eye view lets you see things in a more complete view but you won’t see anything particularly detailed without mousing over icons to give you a small real-time footage of the area/squad. As you can only build rooms and creatures from this view; you will be spending a lot of time in it. It makes teleporting squads around a little easier but both viewpoints need to be used to keep a good handle on everything.

Rooms are all of a set size and each has its own entrances and exits. Because of this you have to be very cautious when building up your base; otherwise it is completely possible to obstruct your own future building plans or you can even block yourself off from rooms/passages that are vital for level completion. Unfortunately while rooms can be cancelled before construction starts passages cannot be undone or cancelled after setting them down. It can lead to some awful problems late game if things aren’t planned perfectly during early construction.

The various rooms will give access to all sorts of different creatures, abilities and dungeon enhancing effects. You have the Nursery and Dive for creating creatures; the workshop to outfit them with better weaponry and armour and finally the training grounds and kitchen to improve their abilities and keep them motivated. Other rooms offer more indirect advantages; the monster den lures heroes and passively earns you treasure and the brewery also lures heroes making them less effective in combat.

Monsters come in various forms and are split into a few different groups. The Nursery will allow you to spawn your Imp units and the Dive will allow you to summon the other units. The dive also allows you to house up to five gambling workers who will help you gain random free units in the dive. Aside from the Berserker and Shaman units you gain access to building by having the respective rooms built all other monsters require runes to be bought before you can use them (the exception to the rule is gaining the units for the first time in the single player).

Runes are split into Room, Unit, Upgrade and Custom sections. The first three will gradually unlock over the course of the full game and the last will fill with runes you find via treasure chests and quest rewards. Each section has a three tiered selection of runes the first tier costs one DEC point, second costs three and third tier is five DEC points apiece. Because of how it is set out; early on you will be able to purchase all the runes available but later on you won’t be able to spend points as frivolously as before. You’ll likely not be able to obtain all the rooms or creatures, let alone the upgrades and enhancement in the last two sections.

DEC points are earned by completing a number of challenges off of a list in the rune menu. Each level refreshes the points and challenges; so you can play according to the level at hand, rather than sticking to a specific playstyle. Some points are unavailable to begin with as you won’t have access to the required room but by the middle of the second chapter you can get almost all the points depending on how you spend what you earn.

Squads are your staple for the game as you will be managing squads of creatures more often than an individual unit (which is rather awkward and time consuming). To begin with you can only have one active squad but after spending a little treasure you can control up to four (or five with a rune). Squads consisting of four different units will also gain special attributes like extra critical hit chance or more materials from raids. Squad levels are dictated by the level of the units involved as well as experience accrued with all the present units.

Raids take place on the world map and are little missions of varying difficulties. Each has an easily recognisable reward and difficulty. Most of the time it will be used to earn materials or treasure as they are more difficult to earn but you can also get mushrooms if your dungeon isn’t generating enough or there are some quest based raids that will help complete objectives. While a squad is participating in a raid you can visit the raid site to see how the squad fares but you can’t do anything more than just watch.

Quests will occasionally take the form of raids but the majority of quests lie in a separate section that occupies a space nearby to your dungeon. Your creatures initially will have to get there via a passage located somewhere in your dungeon but once visited you can teleport between the two areas reasonably easily.

In this separate section it is more like a typical prefabricated dungeon. You explore the various rooms/open areas and will take part in objectives in your main overarching quest for the level or some of the various sidequests. Full of heroes and monsters; the bulk of the commanding gameplay will take place here. You’ll occasionally have to transfer units and squads between the two areas but that will mostly be to protect yourself from heroes or heal up.

Heroes will invade your dungeon quite regularly and as time goes on their power increases quite dramatically. At first they will be a nuisance and they gradually become more and more effective of disrupting the questing you do elsewhere. Ladders appear just before heroes enter your dungeon; allowing them to come in from any one of the ladders that you don’t destroy in time or just through the main entrance to your dungeon.

Multiplayer and co-op are currently in beta so it’s fair to say that they aren’t quite good to go yet. The multiplayer has a King of the Hill mode and the CTF variant Capture the Dragon both of which supports up to four players and have a few maps for use. You can see games that are available to join while on your profile but there don’t tend to be that many games showing up.

Story

The story is fairly light-hearted considering the matter of killing innocents and torture is regularly involved. The dialogue makes a strong lean towards being humorous and doesn’t always work; Báal’s quips aren’t particularly witty but Oscars bumbling nature can occasionally raise a smile.

Presentation and Audio

The voice acting is very mixed; with Báal’s voice being the most irritating as the same obnoxious lines are spouted when you move him about. The character and creature design are quite good; the human characters unfortunately look more outdated than the Imps and other monsters.

Gameplay

There isn’t a lot of management of the rooms as they are all made to definite sizes and the choice in runes will limit what you have available to you. More about squad management and using superior numbers in most of the situations; you can liberally let your higher level units die without feeling too much loss in time or resources.

Overall 

If you really like dungeon management or strategy games then you can get a fair amount of enjoyment from the game. It has lots of ideas of both its own and those inspired by Dungeon Keeper but it doesn’t push the potential of any of the elements as far as they could. The user interface is quite clunky; so some things that should be easy require much more micromanagement than usual.

Comments:

Management games like this have always been something to enjoy and I love seeing these games come back with new ideas. Impire has lots of little things that I like but they all go mostly unrealised and have little depth to them. The rune customisation lets you mess around with many different playstyles; Báal has his various different forms that will affect how you play but they don’t offer as much as they could because of the problems that lie elsewhere.

Disclaimer:All scores given within our reviews are based on the artist’s personal opinion; this should in no way impede your decision to purchase the game.