Overlord

Overlord - $4.99
Time Played Before: 0 Hours
Time Played After Completion: 10 Hours

Review

Overlord really doesn't do anything new, but that's not really a bad thing. Anybody who has ever played Pikmin will instantly understand.  You are awakened by goblin like creatures, your minions, and told the previous overlord has been defeated by heroes, and that you must take up his wraith of terror. First by restoring your tower and then by doing deeds of good or evil across the land. The story is nothing special, especially when there is no direct one until near the end.

When I compared it to Pikmin, I wasn't exaggerating. You control the central character and move your 4 types of minions around the screen. They fight, move objects, solve puzzles for you. The overlord can engage in combat, but he doesn't do much until late in the game. Without your minions you are nothing. While it's not a new idea, it does do it right, the same way Pikmin did.

The minions you control are browns, reds, greens, and blues. Each has a strength and weakness to them. Browns are your main tanks. Reds dish out fireballs from afar and can also remove burning wreckage from your path. Greens use a back stab ability on enemies and can eliminate poison plants in the way. And Blues can traverse water and resurrect fallen minions, but have little combat prowess. Exploring the world unlocks the latter 3, allowing you to solve puzzles in the different zones.

 It's never overly difficult, as you usually have plenty of minions to re summon should you need them. To re summon them, you must first find a pit of theirs with their corresponding color. You then spend colored life force taken from fallen enemies to summon. Each color represents the respective minion. If minions die you are rarely in a bind. You can maneuver them to avoid attacks, but in the end, I usually just swarmed my enemies with numbers. Minions equip themselves with armor and weapons found in the field. And by armor and weapons, I mean anything they can find. I frequently saw my minions wearing rats on their heads and using zombie arms as their weapons. I'm not sure how much it improves them, but it was enough to notice.

You can also forge new items for your overlord. A choice of 3 weapons and the forging of chest and head armor are available. Upgrading your current items is possible as well. As you progress in the world, you find new smelters, allowing you to forge new items. Also, with the expansion pack: Raising Hell, you also find molds to create unique weapons. To forge items or upgrade items, you must  have both gold and enough minions to sacrifice. They happily jump into the liquid metal for you, killing themselves to better your life, as minions should.

 The game allows you to be a good or evil overlord. Depending on your route, from one extreme to the middle to the other extreme, different endings are available, giving some replay value. For mine, I went as evil as I could, though I'm sure I missed opportunities since I wasn't maxed out.

 Graphics are ok, I mean, the game was made 6 years ago. It's funny to see how far we've come with facial software when you play a game like this.

The controls took me a while to get used to, but once I did I had no problem. Seeing as how most 3rd person cameras now a days are controlled by the right stick, I was surprised when I had limited control of the camera, only allowed to center it. This is because the right stick is to control your minions. The camera does an ok job, sometimes getting annoying, but I don't really remember damning it anytime after I got the hang of it.

The game's dialog is occasionally humorous, but nothing too special. I actually enjoyed the minions bantering more than most set dialog.

 While I couldn't get the game to run at all on my old AMD system and could with the Nvidia setup, I still ran into problems. Random crashing happened frequently, at least once an hour, sometimes more. More annoying was having to run through places again due to the use of auto save. While auto save can help, if it's not done enough in a crashing game, it's useless.

I played through the expansion as well, as I had it, and it adds 4 new areas to explore. You face old bosses as you traverse the evil abysses, but apart from adding unique weapons to forge, it didn't add much new to the game.

Final Verdict

Gameplay: 6/10
Graphics: 5/10
Sound: 6/10
Story: 5/10
Replay: 7/10

Overall: 6/10

Overlord is one of those cases where copying a successful game and changing a few aspects just doesn't work for it. It also doesn't work against it though. If you're nostalgic for those tiny plant creatures while waiting for the 3rd installment, and feel like being a little evil as well, try Overlord out. By no means put it to the front of your backlog though, it just doesn't do enough.

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And a new roll.
We have..
Gratuitous Space Battles - $14.99
I shall begin playing immediately. Should have it finished by Wednesday at the latest.