Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

Every once in a while the bad guys win.  Event Horizon, Memento, Dawn of the Dead, Silence of the Lambs, Swordfish, The Usual Suspects, Sev7n, and Saw are all great examples of movies that will have you rooting for the bad guys.  Unfortunately there are fewer examples of video games that let you play as the bad guy, so I was very pleased to see the Codemasters / Triumph Studios collaboration Overlord hit my doorstep. 

I went into my review of Overlord hoping for the best, but expecting something rather shallow.  I predicted that there would be minimal opportunity for true evil, providing few moral choices and simply focusing on the look of being evil.  I was completely wrong.

The game kicks off with you buried and dead – a fitting beginning for a violent end.  It seems that prior to this point the forces of good had managed to wreck the tower of evil and put you in a pine box.  Your minions, loyal to the end, have found your resting place and brought you back to life.  Helping you don armor that makes an immediate evil fashion statement, your minions help you get back to your tower and explain the situation.  While you were pushing up daisies, good has beautified the world and filled it with furry-footed Halflings, happy bouncing sheep, and dim witted denizens to tend to the flowery goodness that has covered the land.  The time has come to crush some flowers under the steel boot of evil.

I. Minimum Specification:
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- Windows XP
- DirectX 9.0c
- CPU: Pentium 2.4 GHz or Athlon XP 2400+
- 512 mb RAM
- Graphics Card: GeForce FX5900 / Radeon 9500 or above
- DirectX 9 Compatible Sound Card
- 1.2 Gb Hard Drive Space

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Recommended Specification:
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- Windows XP / Vista
- DirectX 9.0c
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2
- 1Gb RAM
- Graphics Card: GeForce 7800 or Radeon X1800
- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Sound Card
- 1.2 Gb Hard Drive Space

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Supported Graphics Cards:
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ATi Radeon 9500, 9600, 9700, 9800, X300, X600, X700, X800, X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950
nVidia GeForce FX5900, FX5950, 6600, 6800, 7100, 7300, 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950, 8800

Not compatible with all integrated sound/graphics solutions (inc. Laptops).

Let’s knock out the video options before we get into meat and potatoes of this section.  The graphic options are fairly simplified with three simplified detail options and resolutions ranging from 640x480 to 1920x1200, including the option of running in windowed mode.  Running on my M170 laptop I was able to crank the resolution to 1280x1024 with high detail and maintain a stable framerate.  That said, the game doesn’t degrade that much even if you turn the details down to low and set the resolution to 640x480.  While the game does look a bit more jagged, and you lose all of the great lighting subsystems, it really doesn’t look any worse than an original Xbox title.  It’ll pretty much run on any reasonable system at this detail level.

Triumph Studios is known for their previous titles, Age of Wonders, Age of Wonders 2, and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic – all turn-based tactical titles similar to the Disciples series.  With that pedigree you wouldn’t expect to see a good looking action title, much less one with normal mapping, perfect framerate, and great detail, but that is what we have here.  The world of Overlord is filled to the brim with detail.  Your armor is etched with what looks like hand-hammered runic detail.  The steel catches light reflection from nearby fire and sunlight.  It is what you might expect from a veteran development house that has worked in this genre for years. 

The environment of the game is as impressive as the character model work.  When your game begins your tower is fairly wrecked.  Debris litters the area with downed pillars and wooden scaffolding everywhere.  Ragged banners flap lazily as your minions work to restore your den to its former glory.  When you finally step outside your eyes are assaulted by the horror of a beautiful world filled with grass and trees that blow in the breeze.  Wheat fields and mushrooms dot the landscape as beautiful flowers are crushed under your steel boots.  Moving further into the world of Overlord reveals depressing swamp lands with sagging trees, seaweed, and dense fog blanketing the water. 

Saving the best for last, let’s talk about your minions.  In Overlord, minions handle everything from combat to carrying objects – being the Overlord means never having to lift anything heavy.  They are your combat shock troops, they are your ranged fighters, they are your stealth assassins, and they are your underwater beasts from the deep.  The four minion types have a wide variety of animations, serving as constant comic justice as they fan out and destroy everything in their path.  The minions, not satisfied with simply breaking everything in sight, will grab objects from the environment to use as weapons and armor.  Your first set of head armor for your brown minions are pumpkins.  They will grab the orange jack-o-lanterns and put them on their head, cackling and laughing maniacally.  Later you can get chef hats, rat pelts, bird heads, cherub masks, crowns, biker helmets, stew pots, and anything else that can be converted into a hat.  Weapon types are as varied with pitchforks, swords, clubs, skeleton arms, scepters, maces, claws, and more being available as you progress through the world.  When you couple this with the fact that you can amass up to 50 minions under your command at the same time, this level of variety is unexpected.  To pull it off with a locked framerate is amazing, but that is exactly what you get here.  Other than a slight non-impacting framerate hitch while pouring steel in your smelter, there are no framerate problems on this excellent looking game.  For a game that is night and day different from their previous titles to come together this well is simply unheard of – fantastic work Triumph Studios!

The graphics are top notch in Overlord, but it is the minions that truly run the show.  Even after playing the game for more than 10 hours I found myself laughing every time my minions found something interesting.  They’ll bring you bags of gold, holding them above their head in supplication for your approval and screeching “For you!”, “For the Overlord!”, “For the Master” and the like.  When they find a weapon or armor that they can use they’ll matter-of-factly state “For me” or “That’s mine!” using the item immediately.  The greens sound more evil and are constantly laughing maniacally, passing wind and causing more laughter among themselves.  The blues look like fish creatures and make glub sounds like some sort of frog.  It is hilarious and adds greatly to their evil nature. 

While you as the Overlord have nothing but the strained grunts of hefting your axe in combat, others in the game give over the top performances.  Villagers make requests of you like you are some sort of hero, your minion jester keeps track of your achievements calling you various titles as “Exploder of Melvin Underbelly”, “Harasser of Humans”, “Quietner of the Grumbling Stomachs”, “Wielder of Steel”, and many more based on your progress through the story, including your various moral choices. 

There is one area where the sound can be irritating – the voice work tends to repeat ad nauseum.  In fact, at one point you’ll be told the story of some local knights who have special armor from an underground smelter only to be told the exact same story every time you walk past that villager.  Even after retrieving the smelter for myself this story persisted.  The more villagers that are gathered in one place, the more you’ll hear the same stories over and over.  There are also sound glitches where you may be asked to go to a particular place to meet someone, only to find that there is nobody there to meet.  You’ve likely completed whatever task you have been summoned to do, but the game still asks you to go there again and again. 

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As with 99% of recently released titles, you can use an Xbox 360 controller, so I’ve included the control layout for that device below.  Before that though, here is a look at how the game controls on a keyboard / mouse combo.  You can cast your selected spell by hitting the E key, selecting your target with the left shift key.  Rotating through available targets is as simple as hitting the Z and C key.  Locking your minions in place in a guard position uses the Q key, placing a marker just in front of where your current position. 

The minion control system on the PC is in fact simpler than the controller option, utilizing the 1 through 4 keys.  The function keys from F1 through F10 select from your various spells, although you’ll probably just end up using the most powerful versions of your spells instead of rotating through them.; Tapping a direction on the D-Pad selects a spell on the console version or when using the controls. 
Overlord uses the standard W, A, S, D combination for movement, with the space bar acting as your action button.  Sending your minions to do your bidding is handled by the left button on the mouse, while calling them back is as simple as clicking the right mouse button.  Being an evil Overlord means crushing the forces of good underneath the boot of evil, but in this game you’ll find that it is the boots of your minions that truly do the crushing.  As your minions act as the primary assault force throughout the game, controlling them easily is paramount.  Simply pull the right trigger to point them in a general direction and they will assault anything or anyone breakable in that area.  To make them return one at a time, simply tap the B button.  Holding in the B button makes all of them return to your side.  If you want to aim them at a specific object, hold the left trigger to lock onto your target, then tap or hold the right trigger to send one or all minions to it.  Posting your minions to ambush your enemies is performed by hitting the Y button – they will stay there until you retrieve them, regardless of how far away you stray.  The A button is used to swing your weapon with the same left trigger lock-on method being utilized. 

If you need more direct control over your minions, you can sweep them to your target.  Pressing the right analog stick in any direction sweeps the minions in that direction, allowing you to drag them along walls and objects, destroying everything they touch.  Since your minions are small enough to go places you can’t, the sweep function is invaluable for reaching enemies or objects otherwise out of reach.

With the left analog stick controlling your movements, and the right analog stick sweeping your minions, there are no more sticks to control your camera.  For the vast majority of the game this isn’t an issue, but every once in a while you’ll find the camera completely out of position.  This occasionally happens with cutscenes, but out of 15 hours of play it only happened a handful of times.  In all honesty, it is pretty well behaved for an A.I. controlled camera.

The only other control issue with the game stems from your minions.  Occasionally they will get stuck and no amount of calling will bring them back to you.  You can wander the entirety of an area and still be unable to retrieve them – you simply have to exit the area to get them back.  They will also carry items for you, but they will occasionally become stuck, requiring you to call them back and then send them back to the object to try again.  Rounding out the ‘stuck’ issue, I personally got stuck in the environment twice during my playtime.  It isn’t a huge loss as you can teleport back to your tower, but you do lose all of the minions you had deployed, as well as any progress you’ve made in that area. 

I’ve described Overlord as a demonic Pikmin, and after playing through the game, it is a position I can say holds up throughout the whole thing.  While you can take your Overlord to the front lines, crushing your enemies with a mighty axe, sword, or mace of evil, your true power lies in those willing to do your bidding.  You’ll square off against Halflings, rogue villagers, dark knights, succubi, zombies, evil cultists, ghosts, giant rats, and much more in your bid for power.  Every living creature that you destroy drops their lifeforce for your minions to collect.  There are four types of lifeforce, coincidentally in the same colors as your minions.  The lifeforce acts as a pool for you to call forth your minions at any of the dispensers within the world. 

The lifeforce you collect is used for a secondary purpose.  As your minions are more than excited to die for your cause, you can use them to imbue your weapons and armor, or utilizing a smelter you can forge new ones.  There are three smelters you can collect, creating new gear with different properties.  More powerful equipment allows you to sacrifice more minions, giving you additional powers such as imbuing your weapon with fire, or the ability to summon more minions.  Without revisiting previous areas there is only so much gold in the world, so choosing which weapons, armor, and tower upgrades to get becomes important.  While most of the upgrades to the tower are cosmetic, simply having a few more minions can be the difference between victory and a painful trip back to your tower in a pine box. 

In the first few hours of the game your missions will be very straightforward and linear.  As you progress, you’ll be given more options and choices.  Will you save the Elves or destroy them?  Do you crush the human village, or keep them as worshipers?  Few choices will have a lasting impact on your gameplay, but you are free to chose which mission to tackle and in which order.  It does mask the linearity of the game to a degree.  Much of the later gameplay involves using the special abilities of your minions to navigate through the linear areas.  The green minions can breathe deadly gas and destroy the source of the toxins, as well as turning invisible for stealth attacks when they sit still for a short while; reds can throw fireballs and walk through fire to take out anything that might burn the rest of your minions.  The browns are your combat mainstays, utilizing any weapons they come across.  The weakest of your minions are your blues – while they are the only minions that can resist magic or raise other minions from the dead, their attack powers are almost nil.  To their credit, they are the only minions that can traverse water – all others drown almost immediately and in the most entertaining fashion.  Your command influence grows throughout the game, but in the beginning you’ll have to juggle and balance having enough combat minions to outweigh your weaker ones.  The puzzles are pretty simple, so the bulk of any difficulty is usually fighting through the enemies in the way to finding the appropriate colored minion dispenser to clear the obstacle before you.

You don’t have to solely rely on the power of your minions to handle combat – you can directly engage enemies with your weapons, often dispatching them very quickly.  In addition, you can obtain powerful spells such as a fireball, shield, or minion frenzy to aid you in combat.  You won’t be leaning on these too much, but the minion frenzy spell can rapidly dispatch a boss or large group of enemies as it gives your minions extra health and attack power but drains your mana very quickly. 

There are two areas where the game doesn’t feel balanced and well executed – the distribution of health and mana, and the amount of backtracking to build your army.  Throughout the world, your minions will come across blue and red bottles that restore your health and mana, but you can also toss them into sacrificial altars to accomplish the same task.  Unfortunately, both the bottles and altars are either too numerous or too few depending on where you are.  In some areas there are dozens of bottles just waiting to be discovered, with altars every few rooms, but some of the later areas are not as balanced with no altars and few health bottles.  Since you will not get any spell to recover health, it can make engaging in combat almost prohibitive in some instances.

Backtracking in videogames is as old as games themselves, but Overlord takes an odd approach to it.  Some areas become populated with easily killed rats when you revisit them.  Others retain their uber-tough giant snail guardians that make it too difficult to bother with.  The problem stems from the lifeforce that you must collect to summon minions.  While the browns are as easily obtained as killing sheep, all of the others require a bit more danger to obtain.  Reds are particularly rough as the red creatures that drop red lifeforce are often fire creatures that can easily decimate a whole army of browns in a matter of seconds. 

Overall the gameplay in Overlord is pretty simple.  The fact that the comedy is so hilarious makes up for a lot of its shortcomings.  Thankfully you can try it out for yourself by simply hitting the Xbox Live Marketplace or navigating to the homepage for the game as there is a demo available for both platforms.  While it won’t give you a broad look at the game, it’ll give you an idea of how the mechanics evolve over time. 

Few games that purport themselves as ‘comedy’ have the staying power to really execute it for the long haul.  Jokes start off fresh in the beginning and get more hurried and flat as you progress.  Overlord manages the lofty task of remaining pretty hilarious throughout the game, never beating you over the head with deadpan comedy, but instead allowing the minions carry that, too.  Their animations and sparse lines cracked me up every time, and the people you encounter have engaging enough comedy to keep you pressing forward.  The package simply oozes with comic mischief personality – something sorely lacking in this industry. 

One area that doesn’t quite live up to the product that surrounds it is the multiplayer.  You have two options for multi play – co-op and versus modes.  The co-op mode doesn’t quite live up to its name, instead pitting you and a friend against wave after wave of enemies.  In versus mode you simply add treasure to the mix and you play to either kill the most creatures, collect the most gold, or both.  It is doubtful that anyone will play either mode seriously as they both feel rather pointless.  Perhaps we’ll see true co-op play or the like in Overlord 2?

Much like the aforementioned Pikmin, Overlord is a simple concept that is so well executed that you can’t put it down.  While the primary storyline weighs in at 15 hours of pure comedy gold, the multiplayer lands with a resounding thud.  Come for the comedy, stay for the minions.

Gaming Trend Score

83

1. Graphics: 95
2. Audio: 85
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 80
5. Value/Replay: 80
6. OVERALL:83