T w e n t y S i d e d

In Overlord, you begin the game with a bunch of nasty little goblins prying the lid off your coffin, standing you up, and declaring you to be their new master. Whether or not you have been fully brought back to life or are simply the reanimated dead seems to be up for debate. In any case, you’re up and about with a following of minions and an evil tower of your very own.

I can’t think of an existing genre that could contain this game without qualification. Trying to categorize this game will turn me into the sort of pretentious doorknob long since lampooned in this Penny Arcade strip. But categorizing the game is sort of my job here, so I’m going to have to suck it up and be a doorknob for the sake of the review. I guess I’d call it an adventure RPG action game with quasi real time strategy unit control. With puzzle elements. And a hint of sim. Or something. I mean, you have these guys, and they kill stuff when you tell them to, okay?

Once you sack a house, smoke pours out of the front door. This is funny in a cartoon sort of way, while giving you a nice indicator of which houses you’ve done and which ones still have goodies inside. Just because I’m evil doesn’t mean I don’t want to be thorough.

The game isn’t anything like Fable 2 in terms of gameplay, but I can see why the two games are compared so often. Both have a stylized storybook feel which is both whimsical and charming, and which acts acts as an absurd backdrop for the hilariously mean sense of humor. (That sense of humor vanishes during the central story of Fable 2, but Overlord suffers no such confusion.) I don’t usually enjoy playing the bad guy. Like this series by John Walker at Eurogamer, I tend to recoil at the thought of being a jerk to nice people. It takes a certain degree of willpower to go for the really awful choices in a game. But this does not seem to be a problem with Overlord. The peasants are humorously thick-headed goofs who are just begging to be subjugated. Their homes are delightfully smashable cottages full of plunder. And putting the lot of them under your boot gives lasting rewards. This is a game that lets you revel in your cartoon evilness.

At the heart of the game is a system for controlling your army of minions, which grows ever larger as you progress through the game. There are four types of minions, which loosely correspond to classic MMO character classes. You begin with brown minions. (Your basic fighter class.) Later you will acquire red minions (ranged attackers) green minions (backstabbing damage-dealers) and blue minions (fragile healers) by performing certain quests. Your avatar can engage in direct combat with the use of his axe and a few magic spells. Early in the game you’ll probably be on the front lines supporting your troops in combat, but as your army grows it makes less and less sense to place yourself in harm’s way when you have so many obedient servants prepared to kill or die at your command. It’s usually easier to replace them than to heal yourself. There is a cap on how many you can lead at once, but there are stone circles spread around the world where you can change the ratio if you find yourself needing more or less of a particular color, or if you need to replenish lost forces.

Have you ever wondered where you put all that gold you’re accumulating in an RPG? In Overlord, you can go to your vault and see your ever-growing pile of ill-gotten dosh. This is very satisfying. It actually made me not want to spend money.

In other games, you must earn your living by trudging through the world, bashing up barrels and crates and scavenging your way up the equipment ladder. But a proper ruler doesn’t waste his time on that sort of gross manual labor. In Overlord, you simply hold down a button to let your minions run wild, smashing and looting everything in their path. (The player base has charmingly dubbed this button “auto-rape”.) Your minions bring the the spoils with an sadistic enthusiasm, and equip themselves with useful plunder. They’re armorless and bare-handed when you first summon them, but they grow in power as they accumulate better and better items. (Which creates a small incentive to use them wisely instead of carelessly sending them to their deaths.) Seeing them caper and cheer as they trade up from one weapon to another is almost as rewarding as getting a new one yourself.

Oppress the people of Spree enough, and they will let you make off with some of their women. They’re supposedly your slaves, although they just hang around your throne room wearing clothing not at all suitable for manual labor.

I need to give Codemasters credit for making an effective control scheme. In this game you have the standard controls: Move, target opponents, attack, use magic, move the camera, and select spells. But you also have controls for directly moving your troops around, breaking them into groups, giving orders to specific minion types or even individuals, directing them to attack or retreat, and a number of other functions. That is a lot of input to pack into the standard controller, and I managed to get the hang of most of it within a few minutes. (Although I didn’t know it was possible to manually manipulate the camera until someone mentioned it in the comments. (I should also note that the camera did pretty well on its own. It’s a rare game that has an auto-camera that doesn’t make a hash of the gameplay. The camera was always where I needed it unless I was doing something unexpected (like making comics) and it even managed to see me through tight corridors and rooms without frustrating me.))

I have a nitpicks post coming up, but the bottom line is that the game is new, different, witty, and fun.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.