Dungeons 3

The pitch: Dungeon Keeper's absurdist little cousin

Dungeons 3 is the third mainline entry in Realmforge Studios' dungeon-management series, released as a full 1.0 on 13 October 2017 with no Early Access period. You play the Dungeon Lord, carving out an underworld base, breeding a roster of comedic monster minions, then sending them up to raid the overworld — part real-time base-builder, part tower-defense-style siege game, part light RPG minion progression, narrated the entire way through by a self-aware voice that spends as much time joking about the game's own reputation as it does advancing the plot. Nearly nine years after launch, it still sits Very Positive across roughly 12,640 Steam reviews (about 94% positive), publisher Kalypso Media having kept it supported with eight DLC releases in that time.

That narrator is, by a wide margin, the thing both sides of the review page agree on. Positive and negative reviews alike single out the writing as genuinely funny and self-deprecating rather than generically "wacky," constantly acknowledging Dungeons 3's position as the more comedic, less mechanically serious sibling to Dungeon Keeper and War for the Overworld. One widely-upvoted review puts it plainly: nobody buying this in 2026 is the 12-year-old who fell in love with the original Dungeon Keeper, and Dungeons 3 isn't trying to be that game — it's trying to be funny about not being that game.

The complaint that shows up in almost every year: it repeats itself

Set the humour aside and the most consistent criticism across nine years of reviews is structural: missions play out the same way regardless of the map. "The strategy for every mission is the exact same. Start off, upgrade extra workers until some enemy enters your dungeon, then build some orcs, capture an island, repeat," one reviewer summarises, and variations of that same sequence recur independently from 2017 launch-week reviews through 2025. Reviewers who came in as fans of Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2 are the most consistently disappointed, arguing Realmforge copied the series' tone and setting without the trap-design and dungeon-layout puzzle that made the originals worth replaying — one calls Dungeons 3 "an anti-Dungeon Keeper clone of Dungeon Keeper," arguing the original was built for replay value in a way this entry simply isn't. It's a fair criticism to take seriously given how often it recurs independently, in almost identical language, from players who clearly went in wanting to like it.

A camera complaint the reviews can't even agree is real

The second most common gripe is more specific, and more interesting for how contested it is within the review page itself: a camera zoom locked uncomfortably close to the action. One reviewer calls it "unbearable" and states flatly that it's "been a complaint since launch and the devs have done nothing to address this relatively simple issue," recommending against buying the game at any price over it. But a different, separately-upvoted review responds almost directly to that exact complaint: "There's a guy in top rated reviews complaining on how close the camera is. If you go into the game settings you can set the camera distance to far, which helps a lot." Both reviews are recent and neither reads as obviously wrong — which makes this less a confirmed technical flaw than a genuinely unresolved argument playing out inside the review page, and worth checking the settings menu yourself before taking the loudest version of the complaint at face value.

Less contested are the scattered technical reports that show up across the years: crashes shortly after launch, at least one report from a player with over 6,300 hours logged describing a progression-blocking bug around constructing in-game "toolboxes" that persisted through a verify/reinstall cycle, and a specific complaint that the game is effectively unplayable on macOS due to the mouse cursor's on-screen position being wrong. None of these appear frequently enough to call systemic, but they're concrete, specific and worth flagging rather than waving away as generic "some people had bugs" noise.

Co-op, DLC and the discount that makes the case for it

Where Dungeons 3 diverges most usefully from a straight Dungeon Keeper remake is co-op: the full campaign and skirmish modes support online co-op, letting two players split base-building and raiding duties across the same absurdist story rather than playing it solo. Reviewers who bring a friend into it consistently rate the experience higher than the solo-only comparisons in the negative-review pile, since the repetitive mission shape reads very differently as a shared joke between two players than as a single-player grind. Realmforge and Kalypso also kept building on the base game for years after 2017 rather than walking away at 1.0 — eight DLC releases since launch, mostly extra campaigns rather than cosmetics, plus one soundtrack release.

None of that changes the honest mechanical assessment above, but it does change the value case. At full price, NZ$44.99 is a hard ask for a game whose own reviewers keep comparing it unfavourably to its own predecessor. At the 80%-off NZ$8.99 this review found it sitting at, checked 11 September 2026, that same package — narrator, co-op, eight DLC packs' worth of extra campaigns available separately — is a considerably easier recommendation, and it's the price point the bulk of the positive reviews are implicitly reviewing it at rather than the list price.

Verdict

Dungeons 3 earns its Very Positive rating the honest way: a genuinely funny, well-delivered narration wrapped around a real (if not especially deep) RTS/tower-defense/RPG hybrid, kept alive by years of DLC support and now available at the kind of steep discount that makes its thinner mechanical depth easy to forgive. The recurring "repetitive, shallower than the games it's imitating" complaint is well-evidenced and worth taking seriously if you're coming from Dungeon Keeper or War for the Overworld expecting real trap-design depth — but if you're coming for the joke and the co-op, the joke is still landing, nine years on.