It Came From Canada: Dungeon Keeper

EA Mobile has decided to revive the famous Bullfrog Dungeon Keeper intellectual property for a new free-to-play mobile game. It's currently testing in Canada, so we hopped on a moose to bring you another episode of It Came From Canada with hands-on video below!

Dungeon Keeper is a two-fold game: one, there's the dungeon keeping. This involves getting imps to mine for materials and build traps to help keep out invaders. Imps can help expand the dungeon, though certain spots take more time to open up. Of course, these waits can be skipped with gems. The other half of the game is raising units to go in and raid other dungeons, trying to survive the traps that the opposing Keeper has laid down in order to get their stuff. It's a raid or get raided world.

Thus, in this modern incarnation, the game plays somewhat like a tower defense title: setting up a tricky dungeon with enough traps to keep invaders from getting much in the way of material is important, but so is amassing that army of creatures to go and get more gold and materials from opponents. There's both campaign missions versus computerized opponents, and more interestingly, dungeons of other players to go raid.

The game does have a sense of humor to it, even to the free-to-play aspects: the demon guiding players jokes about how gems may be controversial. At least it's somewhat self-aware for a game that would require a $99.99 in-app purchase to pay for three months of the game's premium service. Of course, that could change before the game's international launch. There's also stat boosts and raid protections available to buy to help make surviving this tricky dungeon world a bit easier.

The game seems to be in a fairly polished state at the moment, and EA's soft launches usually last less than a month, so there's a good chance that you'll have a fairly well-formed dungeon by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. Can't wait till the international launch? Check out our hands-on video below.