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Morality is a complex thing. I don't think we should be quick to judge and, in particular, I don't think you should be quick to judge me just because I happen to enjoy my new job as a dungeon master. I know how it looks when teams of warriors, wizards and priests travel great distances to find me and to fight me, only to find themselves pressed into service as dummies in my training room, but I want you to remember that these people are hunting me in my own home. They're walking through corridors that I carved myself and trashing all the facilities that I painstakingly assembled and arranged. They're ruining my mushroom-based economy and for this there must be Consequences.Look around. I built all this myself, mostly with my own money (a small percentage of that may technically have been plundered, but I don't have those figures to hand right now) and these people are ruining my livelihood, the job that I've come to love, and I really do love it. When Milton wrote that it's better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven, I think he was saying that there's a lot more to enjoy when you work down under. There's less bureaucracy, fewer forms to fill in and more of a laissez-faire philosophy. Who cares if I cut a few corners? Or people?
Impire is a mission-based game of real-time dungeon construction and defense, of carving out self-sufficient subterranean lairs and making sure they weather the challenges of the day, be those rival dungeon masters or wandering heroes looking for loot. For those of us of a certain age, the premise behind Impire, plus its often gruesome sense of humour, will immediately summon memories of a certain classic of years gone by. If Peter Molyneux's Dungeon Keeper is not the elephant in the room when I talk to Yves Bordeleau, director of Cyanide Studios, it's certainly a demon that he's all too happy to summon up. Clearly there's some inspiration there, he says, but he's keen to exorcise the idea that this is any sort of modern-day remake. The theme is the same, but the execution is quite different.
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