Overlord

Moby ID: 28862
Windows Specs
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What a bad time to wake up from a long sleep. Gnarl, your minion master decided to interrupt your peaceful sleep because your predecessor screwed up big time. He not only let himself killed by some "heroes" but he also let them wreck and plunder the Dark Tower. Now it is upon you, the overlord, to set things straight and repair the tower so that it might be once again a great testament to the ultimate evil you impersonate.

To do so, you can summon minions out of spawn pits. At the beginning you can only summon brown ones that are dumb and only know how to fight up close. But later you get more powerful minions like the red ones that are resistant to fire and shoot fire bolts from the distance. The minions will follow you around and go wherever you point with your left hand. Depending on what they find on their path, they destroy, kill or plunder. Anything useful is then carried back to you. If they find weapons or other items, they'll make use of it.

Every living thing leaves behind life force after you killed it. You need to gather this in order to spawn more minions. But you are not completely helpless without them - you are an evil overlord after all. Besides your very big axe you also can use spells like the good old fireball or cast a shield around yourself.

As the game progresses and you fulfil quests and retrieve items from your tower, more tower rooms get unlocked, like the Armoury and Forge where you can forge armor and weapons for yourself.

If you are tired of being evil alone, you can activate the multi-player mode. There you can either play with another Overlord cooperatively and try to survive wave after wave of enemies or race against each other for gold or points.

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Credits (Windows version)

208 People (194 developers, 14 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 55 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 45 ratings with 2 reviews)

A Fresh Take on Evil

The Good
The story was truly epic towards the end, and the presentation of the fantasy was excellent throughout! I loved being the worst evil villain in the world where everything about me was evil except for my deeds. I thought I was playing the game brokenly by doing this or maybe the whole evil motif was some tongue in cheek British humour, but all that happened in the game’s fiction eventually came together in a way that was fluidly compatible with the choices that I made. Oh, and about those choices… despite being monochromatic, the choices presented in Overlord were interesting enough to the point where I intend to play through the game again as pure evil.

The combat in Overlord is refreshing and unique enough to be considered its own genre. It seems a bit like Pikmin at first, but the mechanics of these minions address all of the issues that plagued the annoying stuff-dying-offscreen gameplay of Pikmin. For one thing, you can essentially set up ambushes where your minions will cling to a flag that you can remotely move around as you see fit. And unlike Pikmin, your minions are varied enough that you can use them in functionally orthogonal ways (straight up melee, gangsta-style stealth, projectiles, medics). You can summon all of your minions to you with the press of a button, and none of your given tasks in the game will require you to spread them out where they are supposed to do things offscreen. So the management of your minions is intentially very local in nature, and they do a decent job of local pathfinding around terrain and hazards to get home to your current location. The swarm-and-consume tactic may get repetitive after a while, but later parts of the game will force you to strategize. Melee attacks in the game are evenly distributed between all affected targets, so numbers on both sides take on a somewhat RTS-like quality to them. Some creatures are natural minion killers unless you play it smart, and you learn this pretty quickly after losing your entire crew to a single creature. On the Xbox 360, you can walk your minions around with the right analog stick. This is definitely a very unique mechanic that never seems to get old for me as I walk them across areas cleaning them of their useables.

The Bad
I wish the choices made in the game went beyond aesthetics, more. If I save an entire people, I want some reward for it. If I choose a certain tower ornament, I want some resultant affect from it. But alas, a lot of choices in the game were purely aesthetic choices.

An autosave after an accidental evil deed made me lose my perfect record permanently. I really wish there was a manual save into a specific slot and then a quicksave for the autosave slot so that I could revert to my manual save, but alas… I wonder if the developers intentionally discouraged experimentation in the game.

I got lost often, and there was no in-game map. A physical map does come with the box, but it would have been nice if they at least provided an evil compass or something.

Leaving a minion too far behind would result in the minion staying idle. The local pathfinding was excellent, but there seemed to be no global pathfinding in use. The minions had no problem following a waypoint path from a large treasure to the warp pad (possibly hand-laid by a designer), but then those same minions would linger around the warp pad until you came by to pick them up.

I wish the passive behavior of the minions was smarter. For example, when I attack a creature with my own hand, all of my free melee minions should attack that same creature, and all of my stealth fighters should jump on the creature, all of my medics should revive any dead bodies around me… but no, I have to manually set them to these objectives because only some of them will mirror my intentions.

Annoying bug #1: Some of my weaker minions would attack some inanimate object indefinitely because they did damage below a minimum threshold to the object. I had to call them off this object.

Annoying bug #2: After making a huge purchase for my tower, my mistress requested to see me in my private quarters. I went there and a cutscene played. Nice. Then I went back to the tower upgrade center but purchased nothing, this time. Again, the flag to see the mistress was tripped, but this time, no cutscene happened and she wasn’t even there. For the rest of the game, my servant would constantly remind me that my mistress is waiting for me… and there was nothing I could do about this hassling reminder of an event which had already occured.

The Bottom Line
This could be called an evil version of Pikmin, except a lot less annoying to play... and with an evil flair to it. I’d definitely recommend this game to anyone who is looking for something original to play.

Xbox 360 · by Kain Shin (28) · 2007

See no Evil

The Good
Overlord creatively mixes ideas from other games to offer players something new and for the most part it succeeds. The "bad guy on the loose"-flair of Dungeon Keeper in combination with the control over an army of expendable, mindless minion creatures as in Pikmin takes the best of two worlds and adds fantasy parody elements à la Shrek. The result is a game that feels fresh and rarely takes itself seriously, inviting players to explore a world, then wreck it and laugh at the hilarious results.

Graphics are pretty and just realistic enough to give players the impression of a living world, but also exaggerated enough to never let them lose sight of the fact that they're playing one big fantasy spoof. Covering many themes and being powered by a capable engine, the surroundings never get boring.

Overlord offers exploration and customisation and at first goes the right way about dangling rewards over players' heads to keep them at it. The game's centrepiece, the evil minions, are perfect in their roles, skittering around, doing their master's bidding and trying hard to keep him amused by offering him the spoils of war and behaving like a bunch of hyperactive gremlins with barely enough discipline to carry out orders.

The game gets interesting as more of the four minion races are unlocked. All come with their own special abilities that sometimes must be combined to clear the way. Not only is it fun to direct a wriggling mass of imps who automatically do what likely is on their master's mind, controls also allow players to single out specialists from the horde and give them explicit orders.

For the major part players are free to go where they want and side quests offer gold, magical artefacts and additional objects to improve weapons, armour and the overlord's tower, making the extra time worthwhile.

The Bad
Few games allow players to be really "evil", even if "evil" in this case means the clichéd kind of evil we expect from the likes of Ganon, Mother Brain and other famous video game overlords. Ironically, "Overlord", a game the title of which promises exactly that, fails to deliver in the long run.

Although killing peasants, setting fire to their fields and having minions destroy their possessions makes the good populace hostile over time, they simply are no match for the Overlord's wrath and as such stand comparably helpless as their stuff and hard work is ruined over and over. Lucky for them, the Overlord himself is likely to get sick of the procedure more quickly than they because it makes very little difference. So being evil consists of kicking the odd peasant into the dust and destroying possessions and cattle which gets boring over time. But wait, there's killing mighty heroes, right? This being the main quest, what ultimately defies the overlord's "evil" mission is the simple fact that aforementioned heroes who act as the game's boss enemies are much more depraved and hated by their people than the overlord himself. Whether he mows the people down or shows himself a stern ruler, ultimately the overlord rescues maidens, drives out the depraved hordes of those who once defeated him and in order to proceed must take on quests which make the world a better place to live in. Pretending to be evil is all fine and dandy but even so, fighting against people even more evil makes the overlord really what? That's right, a hero.

The game world, although explorable, suffers in scope from being divided into levels between which the game loads. While it is possible to do things that might be regarded as inconsiderate towards the NPCs, the illusion of leaving a lasting impression on the game world is destroyed by the fact that all levels are reset once left and re-entered. It is fun for a while to use amassed riches to customise one's evil lair but in the end even this is just a gimmick to illustrate progress and brings only few real advantages. The fact that players have to return to their lair often doesn't speak for the game, either, as there is a lot of backtracking involved made even harder by the fact that no overworld or region map exists.

The puzzles in Overlord are no real brainteasers and this is where another huge chunk of potential seems to have gone to waste. Very often the solutions are clear from the start and it's the lack of the correct minion type and fiddly controls of smaller minion groups that make tasks really challenging. What takes even more fun out of minion control is that in order to summon members of each of the four races, exactly the right kind of souls must be collected and brought to exactly the right altars. Especially at the beginning of the game this is a chore because enemies yielding souls for blue or red minions are comparably rare. In case a lot of minions are killed at once (which happens more often than benefits gameplay) and a special race players just lost are needed to clear the way, it's back to an earlier level to gather the right souls, then to the right altar to summon the needed minions and FINALLY back to where they were needed to begin with. The result is a lot more backtracking than necessary and seems like a means to lengthen game time.

The Bottom Line
Overlord works as a witty mixture of two game ideas which come from two of the most creative minds in video gaming. Sadly, it fails to combine and heighten the playability and fun of its predecessors and as such falls short of expectations. Although graphically pretty and with a great sense of humour, Overlord is neither as evil and strategic as Dungeon Keeper nor as playable and clever as Pikmin.

Exploring the world, ordering minions around and laying waste to whole regions is fun for a bit but eventually gets a little boring and lacks the scope and impact one would expect from a true overlord's evil deeds. Overlord still is wittier and funnier than the average action-adventure and worth playing, but it doesn't mercilessly rule a ravaged land from a throne of skulls in a looming tower like it promises.

Windows · by Kit Simmons (249) · 2008

Discussion

Subject By Date
Critic score Computer Bild Spiele Flapco (46069) Sep 2, 2015
Another Pratchett enters the literary fray? DJP Mom (11333) Aug 4, 2007

Trivia

References

The seven main bosses, who are responsible for the Overlord's defeat prior to the game's events, are all based on the seven deadly sins.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Sicarius.

Additional contributors: Alaka, UV, Mark Ennis, Starbuck the Third.

Game added July 1, 2007. Last modified March 11, 2024.