Dominus
DOS - 1994
Description of Dominus
One of those true classics that broke the mould and proved to be a building block in the creation of other clones.
Dominus gives you control over a small kingdom just before hordes of lethal creatures begin to invade looking to pillage all your resources. Your kingdom consists of acres of land, ranging from your castle, through stages of populated areas, down to wilderness, all packed full of tasty looking resources. Under your control are your four generals and their armies of your own diverse and just as lethal creatures.
You can choose to command your generals to perform various tasks or take direct control of any of the tasks possible. for example, one of the biggest features of Dominus is the ability to make a myriad of different traps, you can either assign one army to spend time creating traps for you while you go about other tasks or you can make the blueprints yourself, linking a trigger with an effect (one of my all time favorites is the Chest-Thing trap).
Magic is also available and can be used to do all sorts of unfriendly things to your enemies, you begin equipped with a vast spell list and a few components to mix them. Spells range from Disintegrate to Polymorph and all have a different use: Net, for example, can be used to snare enemies and allow you to drag them back to your dungeon where they can be interrogated and put to use in your own armies, you could then use the spell polymorph on them and turn them into various different creatures, my favourite is the Draconians who can be Polymorphed into fierce fire breathing dragons.
Creatures can be used for very specific purposes and fight well against certain types of enemy, most combinations are fairly obvious such as Water Elementals being stronger against Fire enemies. When you have a large selection of creatures, up to six can be magically merged to form a large hero creature, and their are numerous combinations and effects, I'm pretty sure I haven't seen them all but I keep trying.
I commonly refer to this game as the original Dungeon Keeper, only packed with many more types of monsters and slightly more pixelated graphics. This game has definitely found it's way into my favorite list, and it is still replayable to this day.
Review By HOTUD
External links
Captures and Snapshots
Comments and reviews
AgentForest 2022-01-23 0 point
My favorite traps were Chest+Net and Tripwire+Pit, so I could capture enemies. Interrogate them for spell recipes. Eventually get the Clone spell. Make a super-monster by combining the best stats of each race, release it, clone it, then pick up all the clones. Now I have an unstoppable horde of super soldiers.
Then I'd fill the entrance to the higher levels of my castle with Motion Sensor+Acid and Pressure Plate+Explosion traps. A few poison gas traps too. To keep things from ever getting to my sanctum, lol.
This game was like RTS, Tower Defense, and Pokemon all in one. I miss it so much.
Robot3B 2020-12-19 0 point
This was one of my favorite games of all time. I would lay a whole gauntlet of traps to decimate an invading horde. My favorite monsters to deploy to fight the hordes were the pink dragons (I forget the actual name of the monster). They would breathe fire at the enemy troops to kill them. And you could combine your monsters to create a new super monster.
saburai 2019-11-07 1 point
I had this game way back when.
I have a very strong recollection that one could play the disc in a CD player and listen to the game soundtrack, and that the soundtrack was exceptional. However, playing the game here in the browser, the soundtrack is, to put it kindly, not very good--low quality midi at best, weirdly out of tune.
I noticed that there was a simple game download (about 13MB) and an ISO download "with music" that was something like 400MB. I wondered if that included the CD version of the soundtrack; I can't imagine why they'd wall off the good music, but clearly the 13MB version's music is awful, so I figured I'd see if I could recover the CD soundtrack.
But when I downloaded the bin and cue files and converted them into an ISO that could mount, no music comes out. No audio file appears on the set of ISO files. Furthermore, although I can open the CD with a music player and although it believes it is playing a 45-minute long track, the track is empty. My computer makes no sound.
Does anyone have any suggestions for seeing what exactly is included in the "with music" version of the ISO?
Slithica 2017-05-17 0 point
Played this on original disk on windows 95. I thought this was truly amazing. Loved it. I can't believe nobody knows about it and that it was so rare.
It was an awesome game. Most strategy games now don't even have as much depth.
File cat.opt (or other) not found 2017-03-12 0 point
I had the original disc for a long time, but was never able to play it due to it noting several errors. The best I could do was make the title screen appear, before crashing after clicking New Game... Download it here, and it still doesn't work for me, even with a different machine. Anyone having problems with it?
Orlwick 2016-12-16 0 point
I got this game WAY back when it first launched. It was on a sexy holo blue disk and I adored it. Now that it's free, I'll just nab a nice free download of this game since it was so much fun. I used to trap enemy units by the hundreds and turn them against the waves that comes at you, so fun!
intrepid486 2014-08-08 2 points DOS version
I had a demo of this game that came with system shock and a paper airplane game, pretty sweet but you only got to play for like 5 min.
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