Review: What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord!? 2
Title screen for What Did I Do To Deserve This, My Lord?! 2
Initial Thoughts: I don’t know much about this, except that it’s a dungeon-builder sim, ala Dungeon Keeper or Evil Genius, and it comes with the first one already included. That’s plenty of reason to give it a shot, as far as I’m concerned. I’m a big fan of dungeon builders, and sim games in general. Even though I didn’t get to play Dungeon Keeper for quite a while it’s always been appealing in concept, and Evil Genius confirmed that yep, that’s a genre I enjoy. Here’s hoping it’s a fun little portable version of those sorts of games.
Post-Completion: Well, this was disappointing.
WDIDTDTML!? 2 (Wow that acronym is longer than most words) is something of an odd game. To be fair, that seems like something of a given, considering the title – I doubt many people would expect a title like that to house a terribly serious title. Maybe some kind of masocore platformer, but certainly not something that didn’t have a sense of humor about itself.
In WDID (I am not typing that all out again, no way), you play as a god. Specifically, an evil god, being worshipped by some overlord. He wants to do all the appropriate evil overlord actions, worshipping you, building a dungeon, worshipping you, raising monsters, worshipping you, and so forth, but the heroes keep busting in and ruining all his plans, so he begs for help.
Each level drops you in Badman’s dungeon and tasks you to build it and fight off the encroaching heroes. In that basic, conceptual level, then, it is very much the Dungeon Keeper Lite I was hoping for. There’s also a fair bit of NIS’s standard goofy, fourth-wall-breaking, absurdist humor, which I happen to enjoy quite a bit.
That’s just rude, I mean really.
Sadly, that’s just about all I wound up enjoying.
Unlike most other dungeon-builders, the two dimensions at play are vertical and horizontal. This winds up actually coming into play, but only to make things as annoying as possible – more on that in a minute. Beyond that, it’s pretty standard 2D grid system.
Like in similar games, you lay out a devious dungeon to vex the heroes that come in, and populate it with monsters. Unlike in similar games, you, um… don’t do anything else.
There aren’t any traps to set, so you have to rely entirely on the monsters you try to make. And I do indeed mean “try”, as you have extremely limited control over the ecosystem of your little dungeon world.
See, “ecosystem” is really the most accurate word for it. You’re not hiring monsters, or even really breeding them, beyond the most basic levels. You’re building an environment to create conditions that will cause the monsters you want to come into existence. If that sounds like a headache, trust me, it absolutely is.
An example of the sort of headache you’re dealing with.
See, you want something, you start with slime, or wisps. Then those eventually become plants that can feed other monsters. Then bigger monsters eat those monsters, and that’s just the way it goes.
I’m not opposed to the idea of a food chain in a game like this. It’s honestly an interesting concept, and properly implemented I think it could go a long way. Unfortunately, this feels about as far from the right way as you can get.
I guess you could argue that this way is more realistic, dependent as it is on dumb luck. You can’t really place these things – the system has to maintain itself. The slimes go around and soak up energy, then they die and turn into plants, and the higher levels monsters eat the plants, and sometimes maybe they make eggs, and you have no say over any of that. All you can do is set the basic layout and then hope it works out.
I recognize that this is not a very helpful description, but unfortunately I can’t do much better. To this day I still don’t get it, and after trying a few times, I gave up in frustration on the first level. It may just be that it didn’t click with me and will make sense if someone else gives it a try, but it’s not like I’m new to video games – I’ve played plenty of games of all types and I just could not wrap my head around how to make it work for me. It’s obtuse to a level that just completely shut me out of any understanding of it.
This makes for such a frustrating time that it ruins the dungeon-building fun that you could be having. By the time the heroes came in, I was completely ready for my Evil Overlord to get taken away by them and just shove off.
I’m a God of Destruction, man, I do not have time for your stupid ecology simulator.
Image Credits:
1) http://www.examiner.com/article/review-what-did-i-do-to-deserve-this-my-lord-2
2) http://www.gamefaqs.com/psp/943635-what-did-i-do-to-deserve-this-my-lord/images/screen-3
3) http://www.amazon.ca/What-Did-Deserve-This-Lord/dp/B0031AV9K6
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