Overlord Review
February 6, 2008
After hearing several people tell me about how great Overlord is, and how it’s got all the comedy of Psychonauts combined with the gameplay of Pikmin, I finally decided to try it out. I have to say, I’m not disappointed. Although the game gets a bit tedious, and you can easily throw away twenty minutes of work by accidentally clicking in the wrong place, it still managed to entertain me.
Overlord is different from the typical video game in two ways: It’s funny, and you play as the bad guy instead of the hero. The introductory video and tutorial show you how you have inherited an evil empire from a previous Overlord who was killed by a group of seven heroes. Your evil lair, a tower, has been ransacked, damaged, and most of the minions have left. Your main goal throughout the game is to repair your tower, find the three lost minion tribes, and kill the seven heroes. Gameplay consists of commanding legions of Minions to solve puzzles, attack enemies, carry objects, and perform other tasks to expand your evil empire. You start out with brown minions who can fight well, and you have to find red minions who can throw fireballs, green minions who can turn invisible, and blue minions who can revive dead teammates. In addition to that, red minions can walk through fire, greens can go through gas, and blue one can swim. Your character is a skilled fighter, but you can die easily if an enemy gets in a good shot, which makes your minions a valuable asset to protect yourself. You simply look at something, and give your minions the “go” command, and the game’s AI is smart enough to make them figure out what to do. Minions can attack enemies, carry objects, and disperse barriers. You can control more and more minions as the game progresses, making it easier to handle such a large group. You can also use your minions to upgrade your armor and weapons. You do this by making hundreds of different minions sacrifice themselves by jumping into the forge, which then makes you have more damage, defense, fire damage, regeneration, magic, or health. You can learn several spells, such as a fireball or shield spell, and your spells change depending on whether you decide to be extremely evil, or just a tiny bit evil. The setting is the typical magic filled land of most fantasy games, complete with Elves, Dwarves, half-lings, trolls, unicorns, zombies, knights in shining armor and, of course, an evil overlord. What makes the setting unique though, is how the game has a light, humorous attitude, which makes it much easier to play than grisly, dark games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Doom. The music isn’t phenomenal, but it’s good enough to keep me from using my own music. The graphics are also good, but it’s been years since a game had “bad” graphics, so it doesn’t really matter. Despite all the good things tossed into a single package, Overlord manages to have a few bad things to turn a good game into a sub-par one. The controls are a bit difficult to wrap your head around, especially when you try to make a few groups of minions do several things at once. The “manual” control of minions is difficult, since they stop go to whatever you’re guiding them towards in order to attack a random enemy, break open a box, or some other trivial task. The camera controls are flaky, and it seems to jump every now and then, even though you aren’t doing anything. You can only recall minions one at a time, or all at once, and there’s no way to easily recall a select group of minions, or separate them into any categories other than color. It would be much easier to play if you could make a group of minions from two different colors, a group of 10 of one color, and then a group of 3 of each color, and assign each group to a key, but instead you have to manually select each group every time. This makes it so you have to often send out a group of minions unprotected while you quickly change to a different group. Later levels become slightly repetitive, and the controls make it easy to kill off have your minions before you realize what’s happening, and the AI continually has minions accidentally burning, drowning, or poisoning themselves to death.
Despite all it’s shortcomings, Overlord manages to pull off a nice blend of action, role-playing, and strategy to create a great gaming experience. If you feel like taking a break from more traditional serious games, then Overlord is for you.
Overlord gets a C+
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