Dungeon Lords has the best possible copy protection, one that's practically foolproof and works around 100% of the time: it's so shitty noone will bother to download it, and if you bought it you'll only give the entire original package to your worst enemy as a gift rather than give copies to your friends and family.
I played it. Tried to, rather. Both unpatched and patched, though I think the patch basically removed the character customization options that didn't work anyways and not much else.
I encountered pretty much every bug commonly posted here and elsewhere, though I didn't get far enough into the game to see some of the bugged quests and empty areas that happen later in the game.
One that I didn't experience was the flashing graphics, the graphics on my Radeon actually looked decent. Decent as in they looked all right, with no obvious blemishes, which shouldn't have been too hard since every texture I saw was pretty bland and generic. Note that some files in the game directory are dated from 1997, probably copied directly from Wizards and Warriors.
No character customization, no matter what that idiotic review said, check. No automap, though some fanbois on the Dreamcatcher boards hint that you may need to buy it somewhere but they don't know for sure, check. No quick slot menu, check. No changing resolution without exiting the game (though not so much of a bug, lots of games do that, but there's just as many or more that don't require a restart), check. No target cone to show who you're aiming at, check. No background music (which may be intentional, and the lack of it doesn't bother me at all), check. Bloody easy to get completely lost due to no automap (it's been years since I made an actual paper map of a game I played), check. Pauses when just walking around due to who knows what, check. Pauses when an enemy is spawned (that happens a lot), check. Spells that worked pre-patch but do not work at all post patch (forget about making a pure mage after the patch), check.
That's the big ones. A couple of smaller bugs include the junk option in the inventory doesn't work, meaning you throw away anything that you already have one of. That would be cool in some games, but this is a dungeon crawl and loot is to be sold to gullible shopkeepers, not immediately trashed. Left handed avatars, that's not a big deal to me personally, but it'd be nice to have at least that much customization. Long load times, yeah, it takes a while to load anything. I haven't timed it, though I also haven't felt that the load time was exceptionally long on my system (P4 3.0Ghz, 1 gig dual channel ram, SATA drives).
Combat goes from really sucky to really cool. At a lot of different places, you can stand on cliffs or boxes and suddenly the enemy can't see you any more. Sometimes you'll hit a creature and it will just bleed a little bit, which is cool cause then you can hit it again, other times you hit it (with the same attack animation) and it'll fly halfway across the room. One really cool thing I found was the goblin ballistas. They shoot this huge spear at you that will knock you flat on your back. At one point I was taking a running jump over a small chasm to attack a ballista, and it shot me in midair when I was halfway across. It knocked me all the way back to where I started my run, that was great. Some fights take place on ledges, which is very annoying, since one little tap and you fall down, so you go all the way back up to the ledge to be knocked down again. Annoying, but not a gamekiller, and pretty much the only way to do it (short of every ledge having guardrails) with the combat system being used.
All in all, obviously a very rushed game, released far before it was ready or tested. Hopefully a few patches-real patches, not the quickfix tweaks that the first patch consists of-will make the game playable and enjoyable, but I'm not holding my breath.
Glad I didn't pay for it.
