Overlord - Review
Added July 13th, 2007 by Joel Kownacki
Tired of being the good guy? Enjoy raping and pillaging towns and town folk? Minus the raping part, Overlord certainly lets you do incredibly wicked things. Between ordering the gutting of adorable sheep to silencing cowardly humans, Overlord lets you be the badass you’ve always wanted to be. You aren’t actually committing most of these evil deeds, instead an army of minions serves your wants/needs with haste and admiration. Your goal is to go from being a lonely master to a fearsome godlike king. You’re given a choice -- you can destroy and kill everything in your presence or you can help the local population in hope of receiving even greater riches.
You play as the overlord, yes, but really the main points of interests are your little sadistic minions. You start the game with five brown minions that execute everything as a physical attack. As you progress, you unlock new types of imps with different skill sets. Red Fire Imps throw fire, Green Assassins deal out stealth ambushes, and Blue Healers are the only ones that can swim and resurrect fallen minions to fight again. As you command the minions to destroy wooden crates, food, and enemies, they find pieces of gear. As they equip this gear, the damage they do increases and the damage taken decreases. You begin to care for these little guys as you spend more time with the game. Your minions die in battle? No problem, special stones are scattered around the world to summon new ones. You can also replenish the overlord’s health and mana by sacrificing your Imps into fiery springs of death, loyal your followers most certainly are.
The minions are generally smart. They usually attacked the threats first then collected the treasures they discovered. Sometimes, I’d find myself being attacked while the minions were busy gloating about the items they had found. Other times they wouldn’t pick up the life force orbs (think minion lives) when I would tell them to. Both of these negatives weren’t a deal breaker for me because commanding them was still great fun.
Controlling the game is quite intuitive. The left thumb stick moves the overlord while the right stick controls your minions. Click down on the right thumb stick and the camera pans out to a bird’s eye view, very helpful for sending your pets to objectives. Both the LB and LT snap the camera to the back of you so not having control over the camera isn’t an issue. The only problem I have with the otherwise well laid out controls is the sensitivity of the minions when guiding them with the right stick. Sometimes it was difficult to navigate them through different parts of the game. They would either get stuck for a moment or would walk past the objective. Again, not that big of a deal but something worth noting.
The moment you get past the opening loading screen and into the game you’ll realize that Overlord looks a lot like another well respected Xbox RPG, Fable. Being the huge Fable fan that I am, I welcomed the art style with open arms. Plants, grass, and other foliage waves as you walk through it; there is a ton of it painted all throughout the world. Textures are usually pretty sharp but there are moments they look flat and uninspired. Ovens and lava pits spout heat with wonderful blur effects and the forest floor is haunted with volumetric fog. HDR lighting is used tastefully and blends very well with other particle effects. Character models are very detailed as are the items found all over the world. Overlord is definitely a game you would be proud to show your friends.
Bugs, they plague every game and Overlord is no different. I encountered a few worth noting: on one quest, the objective was to enter a house and kill an overfed Halfling. I went in and completed the mission only to come back outside to find him sitting there in the same spot he was at the start. Another glitch I encountered was a weird audio bug. I had no sound coming out of my speakers for close to two minutes. When it did, it fast forwarded through the two minutes that should have been displayed and caught up to what was currently happening.
Summary:
Codemasters and Triumph Studios did a wonderful job with the development of Overlord. What you get is a genuine attempt to deliver something fresh and different. Controlling an army of minions was both fun and rewarding. The evil humor and richly detailed world keep me fastened to my chair for hours at a time totally immersed within the game. Overlord isn’t without its problems though. A bit more time in the incubator could have solved some of the bugs present in the retail game but none of them pull me from away from the greatness in Overlord.
