Gallery: War for the Overworld is a hellishly delightful dungeon sim Gallery Gallery: War for the Overworld is a hellishly delightful dungeon sim + 13

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Pitched as a spiritual successor to the classic Dungeon Keeper series, War for the Overworld became a Kickstarter success in 2013, bringing in £211k for a £150k pitch.

Since then, developer Subterranean Games has been hard at work making the game a reality, with the end result delivering a level of polish that would make bigger, more experienced studios blush.


WIRED.co.uk goes hands on with the game, discovering a deeply strategic and absorbing experience, and a pitch-perfect sense of dark humour.

The main single player campaign sees you as a fallen, forgotten Underlord (a subtle nod to the absence of the dungeon sim as a genre in recent years), reconstituted from the ether and set to rebuild your domain, with a view to eventually take over the surface world. You're entirely removed from the world personally -- both yourself as the Underlord and the sinister figure guiding your actions never appear onscreen, which makes you feel like some sort of demonic chessmaster.

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A dungeon core serves as your focus point, which must be defended at all costs, while minions begin chipping away at walls to expand your dungeon. The first thing you'll want to do is gain access to a portal, usually near your starting point, which allows other demonic creatures to join your cause. There are almost two-dozen types in the game at present, and scope for more. And yes, like its inspiration, War for the Overworld lets you slap your demons silly to "motivate" them.

From there, you'll start gathering resources and materials, and building barracks, training areas, and taverns for your slowly growing army. War for the Overworld proceeds at a pleasant pace, allowing you to get to grips with its systems and learn its intricacies before introducing anything too complex. It's a wise decision -- for younger players who missed out on Dungeon Keeper's heyday and even those returning who haven't played this style of game for years, gently easing you in feels right.


It's a game of micromanagement though, which will naturally appeal more to fastidiously minded players. Minions must be kept fed (build a slaughter pen for an endless stream of micropiglets, which frankly sound too adorable to eat but, y'know, you're evil) and paid, but the money you pay them can be fed back into your infernal coffers at taverns. Each new type of subject brings a new benefit to Team Evil, meaning there's increasingly more going on for you to keep track of. The Gnarlings that serve as your foot soldiers might need to be forcefully reminded to train, while the Cultists spend time in the archives researching ever-more elaborate Sins.

Sins form the game's skill tree, each one learned allowing you to build a new type of room or adding a spell to your arsenal. With only a few hours on the game, we didn't get a sense for exactly how often these are unlocked -- a disembodied voice occasionally booms "Your minions have researched a new Sin!" -- but the early, basic ones seemed to come along at a fair pace and open up some nifty features.

Around this point, your first combat experience comes in, just as you're getting to grips with managing your horde -- more of

War for the Overworld's expert pacing. Your forces will automatically attack any pesky humans or unaligned monstrous creatures that they come across, or you can drop a rally marker onto the map, which calls your warriors to that point. Each unit's health is indicated by a ring of "petals" -- a strangely flowery description for a game centred on harnessing evil -- around a number showing their level. Outside of a possession spell, you don't seem to have much direct control over minions, but you can aid them with an array of attack spells. However, these can only be implemented in areas you control; if your forces continue their attack into enemy territory, your spells are useless and they're at the opposing army's mercy.


The two other playable modes we tested were Sandbox and Skirmish. At present, the Sandbox mode is just that -- an open map for you to carve out to your liking, building the ultimate temple to darkness with unlimited resources to tap. While sharing maps created in the mode is a feature Subterranean Games might offer in future, with a full map editor planned, for now it serves better as a training ground. The open space and freedom to experiment is a great way to hone tactics for the core single and multiplayer modes, figuring out where best to place rooms or units and how to get the most from your minions. There's not much else there yet, but there's huge potential for user creativity if players can actually share their content in future.

Skirmish is a player vs AI combat mode, similar in spirit to a horde mode. Enemies attack while you defend your base, gathering materials to keep your forces up to scratch to fend the do-gooder humans or rogue spectrals off. The AI is ridiculously tough to beat right now -- Subterranean has nicknamed it "Stephen Fright", after the developer responsible for it -- but should be much more balanced by release.

Impressively, outside of some modding, no one on the team has any experience in the games industry. A distributed studio with 15 staff dotted around the world, Subterranean's end product is a remarkably professional, high-quality game that belies the developer's neophyte status. Still six weeks out from release -- the full game launches on on 2 April, with an early access version on Steam now -- the only problems we encountered were of the UI variety. It's a little too easy to accidentally drag the map with the cursor when trying to select a command, and when you have a lot of spells unlocked (as seen in Sandbox, with its unlimited supplies of everything) it can get a touch unwieldy to select the right ones. Hopefully, these can be improved by final release, as what's already here could put some bigger studios to shame.