Impire Critic Reviews

A charming strategy, with pleasant gameplay, some original ideas and humorous wackiness. A must have for old friends of Dungeon Keeper.

On the surface Impire shows some promising ideas. But the deeper you dig the more you realize that almost everything stays superficial and offers hardly any challenge.

Pick this one up from Steam if you’re truly desperate for another attempt at playing the role of an evil dungeon overlord. If you’re waiting for a great game in that genre, however, pass this one by.

A muddled collection of good ideas, Impire has charm enough but its flaws are likely to frustrate most players.

Impire does have an interesting approach to resources, with its above world raids (it’s a 2D map) and points system of dungeon upgrades based on performance but, ultimately, Impire is flawed, conceptually and technically.

The interface is a cumbersome mess, as if Cyanide Montreal, the game’s developer, had never played a real-time strategy game before. The offensive and defensive components of the missions don’t complement each other; they just get in each other’s way and disrupt each other. It takes a half hour or more to build up your dungeon so you can go on the offensive, but this part of the game is nearly identical for each mission, which is tedious.

In an attempt to insert into Impire too many ideas and different features inspired by other games in the genre, Cyanide Montreal has created a product characterized by an extremely limiting gameplay, ironically making the game even more repetitive than it would have been with a simpler formula.

Impire would be below average strategy game in the spirit on Dungeon Keeper, but thanks to really awful, long-winded and unfunny attempts of humour, it becomes something much, much worse.

I don't see much sense in buying Impire. The game is mediocre and has no redeeming qualities in its multiplayer mode (the only thing you do is bring more and more monsters to the battle). Why such a "high" grade then? Impire can be quite fun in small doses. The single player campaign is pleasant and the game looks nice (with the exception of cut-scenes), but that's pretty much it. If you need a good Dungeon Keeper-like game, you should go and play Dungeon Keeper 2.

Impire is not the Dungeon Keeper clone you might have come to expect. It's a micro-management squad based game, kind of clunky and repetitive, but still well-written and funny. If you have time to enjoy the solo campaign, why not, but waiting for a Steam promotion wouldn't be ill-advised.

It does nothing particularly well – in fact, a number of mechanics are an active detriment to the experience, like food – but it also doesn’t do anything particularly poorly. The best way to describe it is tepid.

Building a dungeon and fighting for world domination as a bad guy: familiar territory that doesn’t bore quickly. But Impire lacks focus, feels messy and requires lots of patience. Because of this, playing it often feels like a chore. Impire has a bunch of good ideas, of which none are well developed.

I wish I had nicer things to say about Impire, but my disappointment with its failure to turn any of its concepts into interesting interactive gameplay is total. As cool as the concept is, gamers interested in building an underground lair and tormenting would-be heroes are still stuck waiting for a worthy successor to 1997's Dungeon Keeper.

Impire is an RTS dressed up in the clothes of an dungeon builder. Even though the initial presentation is appealing, the lack of interesting mechanics sets it up for rather monotone and dull game-play in the long run.

A game similar to Dungeon Keeper but worse in every aspect.

Impire is a real-time strategy game with big ideas, but it's not well-developed. If you’re waiting for a great RTS game, you must know that Impire is very repetitive and superficial.

Quotation forthcoming.

The troubled real-time strategy dungeon sim Impire fails to recapture the charms of its inspirations.

A boring strategy game that engulfs the player in repeating the same game-mechanics on every map.

It won’t scratch the Dungeon Keeper itch because it has no ecosystem – it’s an RTS rather than a dungeon-building game. But it also won’t scratch the RTS itch because it’s repetitive, offers little strategic challenge, and is deeply, deeply tedious.