Overlord is an adventure-RPG with solid fundamentals, beautiful graphics and tons of innovative features. But above all, it’s packed with humor and is quite simply a blast to play.
The game begins as a new and fairly weak Evil Overlord, controlled in a third-person view throughout the game. First off, you have to get your home tower operational, and then it’s time to recruit an army of cackling minions to do your bidding. You do so by killing sheep, bugs, enemies and so forth, then capturing their “life force” which works as a currency for spawning more minions.
Once you have a little horde, you send them forth with the click of a button to kill more sheep, or plunder crates for coin and weapons, or open doors, or carry power upgrades to the nearest teleport point, or… Well, you get the idea. In a nutshell, the developers did away with 90% of the mind-numbing tedium of regular RPGs. And it’s about time, I say.
Smashing crates and fetching stuff off platforms got boring and/or annoying in the early 90s. A few predecessors have dabbled with similar solutions (Pikmin comes to mind), but it has never been this smooth and intuitive. Now that Overlord has paved the way, there truly is no excuse for future RPGs to not follow suit. Think about how Supreme Commander revolutionized the RTS interface with the simple but elegant mouse-wheel principle instead of the old edge-of-screen-scrolling; this is equally important.
The world is connected through a number of portals, and each map has numerous spawn points for the various types of minions. Browns, the first ones you get, are your basic fighters. Then you get red (fire throwers), greens (assassins that jump onto the back of foes) and blues (magic users).
Naturally, the world is full of puzzles requiring specific skills, like the water-filled swamp (only blues can swim and fetch items in the water) or boss battles (only greens can run up a structure and leap onto the back of the boss to hit the weak spot).
Have you kicked your court jester today?
You also have puzzles like luring exploding bugs away by having a minion carry one of their eggs into the midst of otherwise immortal monsters, or corralling a nimble opponent by strategically positioning sentries along a village street. None of the puzzles are particularly hard, but it makes for varied gameplay with lots of optional loot and hidden bonuses for those looking to get the most out of the game.
The court jester turned Evil? Not enough kicks, I say!
As you progress, you get main quests and side quests, just like a regular RPG. You also get several opportunities to be Good or Evil, but it doesn’t have nearly as dramatic impact as for example KOTOR. Besides, in this case it’s more like “Fairly Evil” vs. “Really, outrageously Evil”.
Visually, the game is excellent, and the voice acting is hilarious. The game has humor in the vein of the old Dungeon Keeper series, basically reveling in evil glee at every opportunity as the evil hordes triumph over the stupid forces of good time and time again.
It’s not just pretty backgrounds; the character modeling is carefully done to further enhance the humorous aspect of the game. You’ll notice touches like the minions swiping beers in the brewery and getting drunk, then, er, relieving themselves, or coming running back towards you screaming with arms flailing in panic after having dropped off a live bomb or the previously mentioned exploding bug egg.
The controls are a bit of a challenge, however. Basic “sweeping” is a piece of cake, but more advanced paths require direct control. That’s where you may run into trouble and have your minions accidentally run into a fire and perish, or stupidly run into things while a monster happily whacks away at them.
The worst situations are where you have to move your Overlord avatar to a specific spot, take direct control of a minion to carry something, and then simultaneously move yourself out of the way while steering the minion clear of hazards. Let’s just say the camera is not your friend in these moments.
Still, the difficulty level is pretty low and the game is exceedingly forgiving even for sloppy players. Dying has no penalty beyond going back to the latest save. Ample spawn points makes sure you never have to run back far to replenish your horde. Each map has dozens of shortcuts that becomes available, again minimizing the amount of tedious retracing your steps you have to suffer.
Having said that, forgiving gameplay does not equal boring. The single-player campaign packs a good 20 hours or more, and while you may not die more than a couple times you’ll be kept busy with puzzles and chuckling at the merry skewering of classic RPG clichés throughout. This game is all about providing non-stop entertainment, not appeasing hardcore D&D veterans – and that works for me.
Dune-worm, say hello to my little friend!
I did suffer a couple nasty crashes, however, which made the autosave seem a bit inadequate. It kinda sucks not to be able to save immediately after finishing off a difficult boss battle, and then have the game crash to the point of a hard reset (happened after the Kahn fight – very frustrating). But then again, that’s practically par for the course these days, and there’ll probably be a patch before long.
Crashes and control challenges aside, there really isn’t much bad to say about this game. The developers clearly put a lot of thought into eliminating the boring aspects of standard-fare RPGs, and they succeeded admirably in my opinion. Simply put, this is a lot of fun in a very polished package.
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