Overlord Review

Further to my initial impressions of the demo I've now finally completed Overlord and I thought I'd post up my final review of this fantasy based third person action adventure.

As the game starts you become the new overlord of the Dark Tower, once a mighty bastion of evil but reduced to ruins after it has been plundered by the so called forces of good. It's your job to restore the tower to its former glory and once again gain dominion over the lands around you.

To help you with the task at hand you can call upon your minions, small impish creatures that you can directly control or order to attack creatures, retrieve objects or move objects too heavy for your wimpy strength. At the start of the game you only have access to "brown" minions, but you will also gain the devotion of "red", "green", and "blue" minions which have there own strengths and weaknesses. Brown minions are best at melee, reds are immune to fire and can throw balls of fire for a ranged attack, greens are immune to poison and have a powerful back-stab attack whilst blue are the weakest at melee but are immune to some magical attacks and can resurrect fallen comrades.

The controls are fairly straight forward with the only complexity being minion control. The right joystick is used for direct control over your horde and it's necessary to familiarise yourself with the control as soon as possible. Your horde can consist of different colour minions and if you don't want to send the entire horde into battle then you will have to master selecting the different minion types and guard marking. Choosing a minion type is accumplished by holding down the right bumper button and then selecting the appropriate colour joypad button that closely resembles the minion type in question, for example "B" would select "red" minions whilst "Y" would select "browns". You can also leave minions "on guard" using the "Y" button and using a combination of these controls becomes essential the further you progress.

The inhabitants of this fantasy world are all the typical creatures you'd expect, halflings, dwarves, trolls and plenty of other interesting enemies to get your teeth into (or your minions), with some requiring specific strategies if you don't want to witness the slaughter of your impish friends. There are also a number of "Hero" boss characters you will need to dispose of throughout the game as part of the story arc, but their days of righteousness are far behind them. Every hero has become warped in some form or other and towards the end of the game you learn how these former heroes have fallen from grace. Every creature that is killed in the game releases certain types and amounts of lifeforce which is stored and used to summon minions from spawning pits dotted around the landscape and thus a certain proportion of the game involves retreading already cleared areas harvesting lifeforce to ensure you've got a healthy supply in stock.

Although minions help your chances of survival you're not completely defenseless and you have a number of magical spells at your disposal. New spells are unlocked when found during exploration but there are four definitive classes of spells accessed from the D-pad; "up" gives you fire based attacking spells, "right", domination spells that affect your enemies, "down" gives you defensive shield spells and finally "left" results in minion enhancing effects. Of course you can always just wade into combat swinging your axe should you prefer a more "hands-on" approach.

Your tower also provides you with few other distractions. A forge allows you to create three basic weapons (sword, mace or axe) or new armour and helmets once you've recovered the appropriate smelters. All can be upgraded by sacrificing minions to imbue them with magical properties depending on the number and types of minions sent to the flames. Forging better armour and weapons isn't essential (I just used the basic steel set initially), but if you've got minions to spare then it will make the later parts of the game easier to handle. Spare cash from looting can be used to upgrade your tower with various aesthetically pleasing objects like statues or a marble walkway, but these items don't really serve a purpose apart from personalising the look of your tower. Finally you can access the dungeon which allows you to take on most creatures you've previously encountered and is a good way of harvesting minion lifeforce when choosing any of the "beetle" types unless you prefer to venture outdoors to find one of the many flocks of "sheepies" roaming about the wilderness.

On the whole the game looks good with some interesting cliche'd fantasy environments such as the mines in Golden Hills, the twisted forest of Evernight or the halfling village with typical Tolkien-es burrows built into the hillsides. However the game doesn't employ a "roam anywhere" policy and thus you will unfortunately come across many an invisible barrier blocking your path as you try and explore the environment.

There's quite a lot of decent voice dialog employed throughout the game and the sound effects and music serve there purpose well but on a few occasions I found that some of the scripted dialog for Gnarl, the minion master and your guide, to be annoying when repeated; Hearing his explanation of the forge time-after-time soon got on my nerves.

Although the premise of the game is to be evil I was playing through the game to get the "zero corruption" achievement and thus most of my actions could be interpretted as "good" deeds. All the enemies in the game are provided in a negative light, and heroes have long since stopped being heroic. And I ended up liberating the townsfolk rather than subjecting them to tyranny.

Overall I enjoyed this game. It has some interesting ideas and gameplay mechanics, is laced with wry humour and is fun to play. It's not without its flaws but if you're looking for a fantasy game that offers something a bit different then this would be worth trying out.