Overlord - Review
High: Fun interesting play that doesn't last long enough.
Low: Little reply value, over to fast.
There's something strangely tempting about doing nasty things. Sometimes you just can't stop yourself whether it's telling your colleagues what they really think of each other as you leave your job, driving through deep puddles as people queue to cross the street, or making sure that impatient bastard on table four has a few extra short, curly hairs with his meal. These aren't really, truly evil though deeds: they're just mean or spiteful. True evil takes skill, dedication and a complete lack of morals which is why Overlord isn't really evil, either.
On an evil scale of one to ten (with one being Extended Warranty Pushers and ten representing Karl Rove), Overlord is somewhere around the minus 2 mark: roughly as evil as milk that smells a little bit off but isn't, or discovering your new DVD recorder's manual is written in Engrish. There's no danger of getting into trouble by owing the game money or pissing it off: you're highly unlikely to wake up one day with a sheep's head in your bed (unless you put it there yourself, but that's another matter).
Awoken after countless years of slumber with your dark empire in ruins, you play the titular tyrant as he strives to resurrect his power and purge the land of all things fluffy, cute or nice, using miniature multicoloured impish minions to do all the heavy lifting/disembowelling. Overlord plays like the bastard child of Peter Molyneux's Fable and Shigeru Miyamoto's Pikmin a fantasy action RPG with its strategy revolving around controlling minions while its unholy style falls further into vice with a sense of being plucked straight from the sorely missed Dungeon Keeper games.
As soon as you set foot on disgustingly lush and verdant pastures, it's time to use your army of crazed, mindlessly loyal minions to spread chaos and confusion across the land, slaughtering everything from sheep to Halflings as you attempt to rebuild your nefarious empire. After killing a living creature you can harvest their life-force, building up your stocks so you can call in more minions when you need them. They'll even bring the life-force and any goodies they find back to you, gibbering and cackling all the while like armed gremlins with rabies.
You start off the game with access to standard "brown" minions, the fighters of the bunch, and as you get further through the story you'll eventually pick up the fire-resistant reds, poisonous greens and aquatic blues. Each has their own speciality and weakness, such as the blue's ability to swim but complete uselessness in battle, and the greens able to deal with deadly gasses and use stealth when issued with a guard marker. Eventually you'll be able to command a battalion of minions, ready to reduce everything in your path into a crumpled, incredibly dead heap.
Controlling the little bastards is simplicity itself, with attack orders given at the touch of a button, but these can be a little haphazard at time if you're not locked onto an enemy or not facing entirely the right direction, your angry little idiots will just run off in a straight line. You can sweep your minions to a location with the right analogue stick or on PC by holding the mouse buttons down though, so they can get to awkward treasure or approach their foes carefully. The overlord himself is also rather easy to control and has a fairly powerful attack, but is ultimately quite defenceless and weak.
Although they're really rather dim, the minions are mostly smart enough to not be a pain to control. As you smash through crates, boxes and anything not securely fastened to ground, they'll automatically pick up new equipment for themselves to use and won't go out of their way to commit suicide by running into water or fire ...unless you tell them to, as you're the boss. However, they can get themselves stuck on the scenery and if they're transporting large objects such as mounds of cash or bonuses back to a teleporter, they can't be counted on to defend themselves.
Eventually you'll find yourself a mistress or two to hang about with around the tower, and you'll have to do your best to please them despite the fact that you're a despotic overlord who should crush all who oppose or fail to appease you. You'll also be able to use the gold you're amassing to spruce up your tower, adding everything from menacing statues, giant stone spikes on the outside and even a red carpet leading up to your throne, to give you that same rush of being rich, powerful and tyrannical that Robert Mugabe gets every day. Puzzlingly, there's no in-game map, which is surprising due to the size of the various locations and dungeons in the game, and the printed map that comes with the game isn't really all that helpful.
The structure of Overlord is pleasantly semi-linear, following a set path but allowing you to dictate the pace and occasionally choose your next direction. The most frustrating feature is that you'll spend a lot of time backtracking through areas and going from location to location again and again, trying desperately for most of the game to harvest as much red, green and blue life-force as you can while you go. When you get access to more and more smelters in the game, you can sacrifice minions to strengthen weapons and armour, and watch as they gladly hurl themselves to their death so their liquefied remains can make you that little bit more malevolent.
It's such a shame though that despite the promises of horrendous deeds and despicable wickedness, Overlord never really steps up to the plate when it comes to true evil. Rather than plaguing a land with your presence, for the vast majority of the game you're helping to free it from the tyranny of the corrupted heroes, replacing it with your own unique brand of totalitarianism. At no point do you do even the most basic of evil acts, like forcing villagers to work in labour camps until they expire, performing medical studies on them without considering the ethical implications or strapping them to chairs, forcing their eyelids open and making them watch Catherine Tate until their brains explode in horror.
As if it wasn't enough that you don't force your minions to cover themselves in the entrails of the innocent before charging them into an orphanage, there's even an achievement point for completing the game without being corrupt! You half expect to end up saving kittens from trees and rescuing boys trapped down wells. The game does seem to be at least aware of this, with villagers treating you like some kind of hero when you behave, despite your obvious sociopathic intentions and ever-growing army of inhuman babbling imp-things.
Still, the game definitely has the visuals to match its gameplay, and while it might not be the epitome of high-def next-gen imagery, it's slick and fantastically designed. The environments are lavishly detailed and bring the fantasy setting to life, but PC gamers should do well to note that it will bring all but the fanciest and expensive machines to their knees if they want the game to look anything like the 360 version in HD. The game does have a few problems and bugs though, such as the overlord's clunky movement and a large number of areas where the minions and the overlord can find themselves stuck.
Overlord is definitely more evil than most video games, but when it comes to actually performing evil you're left with clear-cut, obvious choices that are rarely anything other than "kill or don't kill the innocent civilians" you never get to choose "dip in acid/dip partially in acid" or "eviscerate/dissect puppy". Thankfully, the game's allure comes from its refreshing sense of humour and the unstoppably manic minions even the game's dialogue is good, in spite of the haminess of it all. Despite its lack of true, nefarious evil though, the single-player portion of Overlord is a great deal of fun, with hours and hours of sheep-slaughtering, hero-smashing and mistress-pleasing.
There are a few online options available for two players, even if they do feel a bit forced. There's versus modes for fighting and pillaging, as well as a survival mode where two overlords team up to fend off a huge force of AI good guys, but none of the modes offer the same level of fun as the single-player campaign.
Overlord won't keep you coming back and again for more, but it's a satisfying, amusing experience that's fairly unusual in today's games industry, even if it isn't quite the bad boy it wants to be.
High: Fun interesting play that doesn't last long enough.
Low: Little reply value, over to fast.
There's something strangely tempting about doing nasty things. Sometimes you just can't stop yourself whether it's telling your colleagues what they really think of each other as you leave your job, driving through deep puddles as people queue to cross the street, or making sure that impatient bastard on table four has a few extra short, curly hairs with his meal. These aren't really, truly evil though deeds: they're just mean or spiteful. True evil takes skill, dedication and a complete lack of morals which is why Overlord isn't really evil, either.
On an evil scale of one to ten (with one being Extended Warranty Pushers and ten representing Karl Rove), Overlord is somewhere around the minus 2 mark: roughly as evil as milk that smells a little bit off but isn't, or discovering your new DVD recorder's manual is written in Engrish. There's no danger of getting into trouble by owing the game money or pissing it off: you're highly unlikely to wake up one day with a sheep's head in your bed (unless you put it there yourself, but that's another matter).
Awoken after countless years of slumber with your dark empire in ruins, you play the titular tyrant as he strives to resurrect his power and purge the land of all things fluffy, cute or nice, using miniature multicoloured impish minions to do all the heavy lifting/disembowelling. Overlord plays like the bastard child of Peter Molyneux's Fable and Shigeru Miyamoto's Pikmin a fantasy action RPG with its strategy revolving around controlling minions while its unholy style falls further into vice with a sense of being plucked straight from the sorely missed Dungeon Keeper games.
As soon as you set foot on disgustingly lush and verdant pastures, it's time to use your army of crazed, mindlessly loyal minions to spread chaos and confusion across the land, slaughtering everything from sheep to Halflings as you attempt to rebuild your nefarious empire. After killing a living creature you can harvest their life-force, building up your stocks so you can call in more minions when you need them. They'll even bring the life-force and any goodies they find back to you, gibbering and cackling all the while like armed gremlins with rabies.
You start off the game with access to standard "brown" minions, the fighters of the bunch, and as you get further through the story you'll eventually pick up the fire-resistant reds, poisonous greens and aquatic blues. Each has their own speciality and weakness, such as the blue's ability to swim but complete uselessness in battle, and the greens able to deal with deadly gasses and use stealth when issued with a guard marker. Eventually you'll be able to command a battalion of minions, ready to reduce everything in your path into a crumpled, incredibly dead heap.
Controlling the little bastards is simplicity itself, with attack orders given at the touch of a button, but these can be a little haphazard at time if you're not locked onto an enemy or not facing entirely the right direction, your angry little idiots will just run off in a straight line. You can sweep your minions to a location with the right analogue stick or on PC by holding the mouse buttons down though, so they can get to awkward treasure or approach their foes carefully. The overlord himself is also rather easy to control and has a fairly powerful attack, but is ultimately quite defenceless and weak.
Although they're really rather dim, the minions are mostly smart enough to not be a pain to control. As you smash through crates, boxes and anything not securely fastened to ground, they'll automatically pick up new equipment for themselves to use and won't go out of their way to commit suicide by running into water or fire ...unless you tell them to, as you're the boss. However, they can get themselves stuck on the scenery and if they're transporting large objects such as mounds of cash or bonuses back to a teleporter, they can't be counted on to defend themselves.
Eventually you'll find yourself a mistress or two to hang about with around the tower, and you'll have to do your best to please them despite the fact that you're a despotic overlord who should crush all who oppose or fail to appease you. You'll also be able to use the gold you're amassing to spruce up your tower, adding everything from menacing statues, giant stone spikes on the outside and even a red carpet leading up to your throne, to give you that same rush of being rich, powerful and tyrannical that Robert Mugabe gets every day. Puzzlingly, there's no in-game map, which is surprising due to the size of the various locations and dungeons in the game, and the printed map that comes with the game isn't really all that helpful.
The structure of Overlord is pleasantly semi-linear, following a set path but allowing you to dictate the pace and occasionally choose your next direction. The most frustrating feature is that you'll spend a lot of time backtracking through areas and going from location to location again and again, trying desperately for most of the game to harvest as much red, green and blue life-force as you can while you go. When you get access to more and more smelters in the game, you can sacrifice minions to strengthen weapons and armour, and watch as they gladly hurl themselves to their death so their liquefied remains can make you that little bit more malevolent.
It's such a shame though that despite the promises of horrendous deeds and despicable wickedness, Overlord never really steps up to the plate when it comes to true evil. Rather than plaguing a land with your presence, for the vast majority of the game you're helping to free it from the tyranny of the corrupted heroes, replacing it with your own unique brand of totalitarianism. At no point do you do even the most basic of evil acts, like forcing villagers to work in labour camps until they expire, performing medical studies on them without considering the ethical implications or strapping them to chairs, forcing their eyelids open and making them watch Catherine Tate until their brains explode in horror.
As if it wasn't enough that you don't force your minions to cover themselves in the entrails of the innocent before charging them into an orphanage, there's even an achievement point for completing the game without being corrupt! You half expect to end up saving kittens from trees and rescuing boys trapped down wells. The game does seem to be at least aware of this, with villagers treating you like some kind of hero when you behave, despite your obvious sociopathic intentions and ever-growing army of inhuman babbling imp-things.
Still, the game definitely has the visuals to match its gameplay, and while it might not be the epitome of high-def next-gen imagery, it's slick and fantastically designed. The environments are lavishly detailed and bring the fantasy setting to life, but PC gamers should do well to note that it will bring all but the fanciest and expensive machines to their knees if they want the game to look anything like the 360 version in HD. The game does have a few problems and bugs though, such as the overlord's clunky movement and a large number of areas where the minions and the overlord can find themselves stuck.
Overlord is definitely more evil than most video games, but when it comes to actually performing evil you're left with clear-cut, obvious choices that are rarely anything other than "kill or don't kill the innocent civilians" you never get to choose "dip in acid/dip partially in acid" or "eviscerate/dissect puppy". Thankfully, the game's allure comes from its refreshing sense of humour and the unstoppably manic minions even the game's dialogue is good, in spite of the haminess of it all. Despite its lack of true, nefarious evil though, the single-player portion of Overlord is a great deal of fun, with hours and hours of sheep-slaughtering, hero-smashing and mistress-pleasing.
There are a few online options available for two players, even if they do feel a bit forced. There's versus modes for fighting and pillaging, as well as a survival mode where two overlords team up to fend off a huge force of AI good guys, but none of the modes offer the same level of fun as the single-player campaign.
Overlord won't keep you coming back and again for more, but it's a satisfying, amusing experience that's fairly unusual in today's games industry, even if it isn't quite the bad boy it wants to be.
Scores:
Graphics: 84
Audio: 84
Gameplay: 80
Replay: 60
Overall: 77
Graphics: 84
Audio: 84
Gameplay: 80
Replay: 60
Overall: 77
