> Personally, though, I’ll take the second game’s refinement over any such nebulous quality. If I was coming to Dungeon Keeper cold today, this is definitely where I would start.

This was my feeling, too, having no prior history with Dungeon Keeper and buying both titles on sale on GOG in the past year. DKII is definitely easier for the modern gamer to jump into. It also had some gameplay ideas that were novel and not terribly well-developed, but just fun--like being able to possess an individual grunt and suddenly have the isometric real-time strategy shift to a first-person perspective.

The possess creature was in the first game. Have you tried the original with keeperFX? It improves the UX for building rooms so if that was your issue with the first game.

Wandering around my dungeon, doing things, in the first person was such a fun experience as well. It felt like such a novel way to explore what I was doing and look at my creatures "in the face" so to say. In some ways it feels like a precursor to things like minecraft, where you could do some tasks as an imp in the dungeon.

There's a big design problem with the 2nd title that only really becomes apparent when you engage in multiplayer versus people.

You can essentially rush to the ultimate Reaper character by just having everyone pray, which is both a game ender and a spoiler, because it really makes the game boring.

Having said that, this was for the original version when it came out, I don't know if they ever did anything about it and/or for the later GoG etc. versions.