Overlord

16.07.2007

Now, here’s a game with a little personality! Instead of helping the “good” and restoring peace to the world (whichever world that may currently be), in Overlord, you do the exact opposite. You must incite chaos and leave a path of destruction behind you.

In this action/fantasy role-playing game, you step into the role of the dark lord (who bares a striking resemblance to Sauron from “Lord of the Rings”), who also donated his name to the title of Codemasters latest creation. You must navigate the Overlord from a third person perspective, through a beautiful fantasy world, and perform several smaller and larger tasks. You still however, have the freedom to choose whether you want to take the noble or the nasty path.

Gnarl, the chief minion, will help you get better acquainted with the controls for Overlord once the evil gnomes (affectionately called “minions”) are saved from the ruins of the demolished tower. This short, but very good tutorial lets you bash the Jester before you go into battle against other creatures. After a brief introductory period, the controls seem to operate almost intuitively. The right mouse button unleashes your minions, while the left mouse button summons the little ruffians back to you. Use the WASD buttons to control the Overlord, and with the space bar he can fight with any weapons that he might have handy. For all-out brawls however, it’s smarter to use your little helpers. Unleash the minions with the right mouse button, and they attack anything that’s not on your side - meaning anything that can be demolished or ransacked. You can send your minions to specifically chosen objects or targets by using the shift key. If you still can’t get ahead as the Overlord, there is always the third option. If you hold down both mouse buttons, you gain direct control of your minions.

What sounds like a commercial for Smarties, accurately describes the races of minions you can summon. As you have probably already guessed, there are four races. The brown minions are with you from the beginning. To get the rest, you have to locate their incantation stone and teleport it to your tower.

These energetic little critters (who look suspiciously like Steven Spielberg’s Gremlins) have different abilities. The brown minions are the fighters and hit (typical in fantasy role-playing games) the hardest, and can also withstand the most physical damage. You meet the red minions within the first hour of play. These guys aren’t very good at close combat, but from a distance they can throw fireballs, which do some pretty serious damage. And, in case any happen to be laying in your way, they can also extinguish burning obstacles. The green minions will help you clear a path through poison-contaminated areas and can do the most damage when they attack from behind. If you let the green ones attack from the front however, they will meet an untimely end. And last but not least, the blue minions. These ones are also not well suited for battle. They can walk through water (which all other minions can’t) and they can bring fallen comrades back to life. This becomes more important as the game progresses, because minion pits can’t be found as often. Furthermore, the little gnomes arm themselves with weapons from slain opponents, and thus improve their own fighting ability. Therefore, it makes sense not to send the entire entourage to their death without thinking.

Overlord contains a little bit of both, but there is about 70% more button smashing than strategy. Sometimes it makes sense to attack certain opponents from a distance or from behind, but most of the time just having enough “brown ones” available to unleash on the enemy does the trick. The number of minions that we can bark orders at depends on how many objects we can find for the tower throughout the course of the game. The more objects we find, the more minions you have at your command. Once you can control one out of 25 armed minions, nothing else can stand in the way of your supreme domination. They make minced meat out of every opponent. The other races of minions are only deployed when their secondary abilities are needed, which makes the game a little boring after a while. More tactical variety would have been helpful at this point.

All in all, Overlord comes off fairly well, and being able to choose whether you want to be good or evil also affects the appearance of your tower and character. One neat feature is that with the money you collect, you can make your tower more visually appealing, but it has no influence on your corruption level.

Overlord is clearly an action game. It certainly does have some interesting fantasy role-playing game aspects, however. You can have weapons forged (as soon as you complete the task of finding the smelters), which increases your corruption level. To give the weapon a little more kick, you can have the minions who are being held captive in the tower donate their souls to it. Your little helpers will jump into the melting iron in a comical animation.

Now let’s move on to Overlord’s presentation. Overlord gives you everything from peaceful, colorful cities, to castle ruins and mystical forests by using a trendy, but far not the most superior, graphics engine. The whole thing is given a nice comic book animation spin. The character animation is a little grainy in some parts, however. The Overlord’s running animation sequences could have been a little better.

Overlord obviously ripped off quite a few of its atmospheric elements, though. The “Halflings” and their dwellings are obviously based on the Hobbits from “Lord of the Rings”, the Overlord in full armor (as already mentioned) looks like Sauron, and the minions resemble Steven Spielberg’s infamous Gremlins.

The background music is harmonious, but the phrases constantly repeated by the NPCs (almost to the second), will really get on your nerves.