For all of its chummy quips and hordes of orcs battling My-Little-Pony-esque unicorns, Dungeons 2 comes off as slightly cynical. The first entry tried to revive . Brighting's voice work never fails to hit the proper notes here, even if the script pours on the self-awareness too thick (at one point, your overworld minions encounter and slaughter a bear, and you're told that it was pointless because bear meat isn’t used for anything in the game). Sometimes, it feels as though Realmforge is trying too hard, although the narrator's always good when he's used as a tutorial of sorts to correct the Ultimate Evil--as the main character's called--when he goes in the wrong direction.

All of this might be much more fun when you take advantage of the LAN and online multiplayer content, which gives up to four players their own dungeons and lets them fight over a shared overworld. Unfortunately, this review arrives prior to the game's full release, so other players are as hard to find as original, sealed copies of Dungeon Keeper from 1997. Its directions are sometimes muddled, and the whole affair feels like it was oversimplified to cut down on micromanagement, but the beauty of Dungeons 2 is that it never fails to let us take some glee in sowing discord. It's not quite a keeper, but it's an improvement over the original.