People are evil, there is no denying it. Sure, some may not show it and most only go as far as doing small evil deeds so that they don't get in trouble with the law. But deep down inside, every single one of us is just waiting for an opportunity to throw a rock at that annoying neighbor. Triumph studios know this and Overlord, their latest product doesn’t really give you a choice between good and evil. Instead you can choose between very evil and extremely evil!

Only purpose is to wreak havoc across the land

Making a game where you can be evil “just cause” can be quite a challenge. Think about it for a second. A maniac killer that slays everything in his path? He was probably abused as a kid, so it is understandable. A pyromaniac? He loves physics, how can you not understand that? But an overlord, whose only purpose is to wreak havoc across the land, now that’s evil! And what better way to make sure that even this Overlord doesn’t have some kind of dark past that made him do this? Well, for starters you can raise him from the dead the moment the game starts. That way you can be sure all his actions are untainted by good. The fact that his predecessor was slain in his own home, the tower you inherited is just an added reason to get back at the nasty heroes that did this.

But there is a catch! The heroes that left your new home in ruins aren’t what they used to be. Perhaps it was the evil that was released at your ancestors death or perhaps it was fame, but for some reason they grew twisted and evil and are now a mockery of what they used to be. In a way they are as bad as you are. You might even sympathize with them until you realize that their actions left legions of imps lost, searching for a new leader. Nobody does that and lives to tell the story more than a couple of times!

Minions

The imps that resurrect you are the first thing you see. They are also the main thing you keep seeing throughout the rest of the game. That is because even though you are a mighty force of evil and are capable of dealing some serious damage on your own, you are still just a man (the badass helmet doesn’t make you immortal after all). And no true ruler does anything by himself anyway. Instead, he has his followers do his bidding.

Reading the game description you might think the game will play similarly to the old classic – Dungeon Keeper. Let me burst your bubble by saying that is pretty far from the truth. The game has its share of similarities to the strategy hit, but as far as gameplay is concerned Overlord plays more like Pikmin (the Gamecube puzzle micro-management game). You control the overlord directly with the left analog stick and can perform attacks and cast spells by pressing the A or X button. Controlling the minions is a different thing. You can have semi-direct control over them by using the right analog stick, but this method moves around all of them, not just the individual imps. There are situations when you can directly control just one imp, but they involve picking up items which requires several buttons to be pressed at the same time. The majority of time you won’t be required to control your minions and will just use the right trigger button to send them forward and do context sensitive actions. If you sent them in the direction of enemies they will attack them. Sending them towards a box that needs to be moved will have them line up at one side and start pushing (you don’t have to worry about the direction the box needs to be pushed it, your minions will take care of everything).

A severed limb as a weapon

Sending minions forward and letting them do everything all the time would become boring pretty fast, so the authors decided to spice up things in several ways. The most apparent step they took was the inclusion of four different minion types. You start with just one kind, the browns. They are the bulk of your army and are by far the strongest imps. What sets them apart from the rest of the minion types (though this is mostly just a matter of visuals) is their ability to pick up better weapons and armor. Sending a few browns into a pumpkin field will usually result in at least one of them having a new “helmet”. Dispatching a crowd of zombies will probably make one of the imps start using a severed limb as a weapon. The list goes on and you will often catch yourself laughing openly at the ingenuity of your minions.

The second type of minions you will unlock are the red fire imps. Their name says is all really. They are capable of throwing fireballs and they are also the only minions that can douse fires at certain points of the game. The green and blue imps you unlock later follow a similar pattern. The green ones are assassins and are capable of removing poisonous clouds whereas the blues can resurrect fallen minions and traverse deep water, something the rest of the minions can’t do.

Each of the minion types requires souls to summon forth from the minion holes found around the game world. As with minions the souls come in four different colors, so you usually have to take care which minions you use, as running out of blue souls in a watery area spells disaster. The price you pay is usually no worse than backtracking to an earlier zone and killing some of the respawning “fuel” creatures such as sheep of fire roaches.

As you can see the mechanics are rather simple. There are some intricacies later one when you are controlling several kinds of minions. You can for example issue orders to only one type and drop flagpoles which make the selected minions guard the spot. This can be especially useful when controlling the red minions, as placing the marker in a good spot makes them all but unbeatable. The maker has its uses with the blue minions as well, as the spot you mark tells them where they should be picking up the bodies of the killed minions.

The first half of the game is rather simple in terms of puzzles and this comes as no surprise, as even after a few hours you are still just learning the ropes. The second half of the game (approximately after 10 hours of playtime) becomes more complex however. The puzzles go beyond choosing what minion type to use and you will often have to backtrack a bit to summon the right kind of minions for the given job. It never becomes too complex mind you, but you will feel a certain kind of pride when you overcome one of these challenges.

Feels Polished

These puzzles form the meat of the game, so if any major shortcomings  exist they will become apparent here. And unfortunately they do. As just mentioned the first half of the game is really just a huge tutorial. While there is nothing wrong with that per se, having to beat an entire dungeon filled with water just because you recently acquired the blue minions is a bit tedious. But the worst offender are the controls. Character movement is simple enough and getting the minions to do what you want works most of the time. Things get complicated when you want to adjust the camera. Because the second analog stick already serves as the minion control method you are required to push one of the shoulder buttons if you want to move the camera around. As you can imagine doing this in the middle of action isn’t the ideal solutions. Micromanaging the minions takes a bit of practice as well and you will often call on the help of the wrong minions just because you pressed the wrong button in the middle of combat. Things get better later on when you get used to the whole control scheme, but I’m sure things could have been better.

Since we are speaking of the shortcomings I might as well point out that the PC version which is identical to the Xbox360 version save for the controls comes with a bunch of problems that are specific to the PC platform. The performance of the game is a good deal worse than on the Microsoft console and crashes are a common occurrence. Without the first patch installed the game also has a fatal bug that is unfortunately still present in the Xbox360 version (a patch should be coming out shortly).

On a more positive note, the looks of the game are pretty good. There are no amazing character models or high detailed effects, but overall the game just feels polished. The game world is very well thought out and some of the locales you will visit are pretty huge. If you played Fable on the original Xbox and liked its art direction you will be glad to hear that Overlord looks pretty similar to that game with some obvious improvements due to the faster hardware. The animations in the game are nice to look at, especially when you focus on all the little things your minions do. Their voices are funny to listen to as well, as are some of the other dialogs you will hear over the course of playing. As I said, the game just feels polished.

Conclusion

Overlord is primarily a singleplayer game. The multiplayer modes are there mostly as an extra and most won’t spend more than a few hours in the versus or co-op variants available. But let’s be honest here – with around 20 hours of singleplayer playtime available the game won’t leave you hungry. Sure, being able to pick the game up again at a later time is always nice and Overlord falls a bit short here – outside of being able to choose the order of tasks you do the game is completely linear, so playing through it again won’t be as fun as the first time. But heck, we live in a time where 8 hours of playing time is the norm, so having more than twice that amount of tyranny and chaos time is more than enough. You just have to give the game enough time to truly evolve, as the first half can be a bit basic and tedious. After that it is clear sailing, so your evil self will be thankful for the opportunity to slaughter all those sheep, villagers and pretty much anything else that resides in fantasy worlds.