Overlord (PC)
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Being bad is a guilty pleasure for video game players and the RPG genre has long entertained them with the results thanks to the stories that form much of the backbone to each title. Bioware answered the question by allowing the player to make choices that would steer them onto the path of good or evil in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Lionhead’s Fable tackled this question, changing the player’s appearance as a shining paragon of virtue or a despotic practitioner of diabolic manipulations.
Codemaster’s Overlord does something a little bit differently, asking the player not whether they will choose to be good or evil, but how far they are willing to flex their nefarious imagination as the living embodiment of foul intentions. But before you start getting ideas such as raining hellfire from the heavens or in devastating the land with your will, Overlord presents itself more as Evil Lite, but not quite as filling.
Wake Up! It’s Time to Do Evil. Maybe.
You are the Overlord, awakened from your stone coffin by little gremlin-like creatures called “Minions” who happen to have been waiting for you to lead them back into the dark. Some time had passed since you were…indisposed…and your mighty home lies in ruins from the last batch of do-gooders that came through to prove themselves. Some work will be needed to get the place back in evil order. The heroes that put you in the ground had left you for dead, but now you get to return to a land that has all but forgotten about you and take back what was yours. Muahahaha!
If you’re expecting a semi-serious take on being the dictator of devilish intentions, this is a game that takes a Monty Pythonesque look at being evil and much of the humor makes this title a lighthearted experiment in having anger management issues while wearing plate mail. Fantasy is turned upside down in this game, but before you get into how Overlord expects to trump your expectations, you’ve got an army of eager little miscreants to lead into danger. Don’t worry. Dying is part of their job description.
Cult of Personality
To help spread whatever flavor of evil you choose, you get to command an army of tiny gremlins that you will eventually be using as an extension of your will, an army that will pillage, fight, and generally get themselves killed so that you won’t need to stain the finish on your waxed breastplate. These are your Minions and they come in four flavors: Browns are the warriors, Reds are fireproof to some extent and can toss fireballs, Greens are the assassins that jump onto enemies to stab at them, and Blues can resurrect fallen Minions.
A short tutorial in the beginning will take you through the motions of how to call them up from Minion Gates and do your bidding. Mouse and keyboard controls are passable, but feel clunky in comparison to a good gamepad. This isn’t surprising considering that the game has also debuted on the 360 and lo and behold, a wired 360 controller makes things easier to manage. For example, sweeping Minions through an area is an easy chore with a gamepad’s analog stick, but with a mouse, it can get tricky in tight situations where you are juggling different groups in certain boss fights, especially if they’ve got to cross a lot of distance requiring you to sweep the mouse everywhere to get them to go where you want them to. You can remap the keys and buttons, but the mouse control for your Minions still leaves a bit to be desired. Controlling the camera with the mouse is far easier with the PC controls, though, in comparison to the gamepad’s which relies more on trying to follow your Minions than in giving the player the option to be able to freely look around themselves with as much ease.
Whatever you choose to control your evil aspirations with, your Minions will be key to your plans. They’ll cluster together and follow you around as you do the third-person “evil trot” from one locale to the next, but you can always sweep them through an area to get to hard to reach places or move them into position to meet the enemy head on. Minion Gates will pop up across the land, each dedicated to a specific minion in acting as spawns, and you’ll also be able to use portals that zap you back to your Tower and from there, to other lands that you may have visited.
How many Minions you can summon depends on how much life force you harvest from the living which range from happy, pasture grazing sheep to evil halfings and dwarves. This valuable currency appears as glowing balls of light that are collected by your Minions, or yourself if you choose to actually walk over to absorb them, when they are dropped by the dead. Each Minion has a specific color of life force associated with each type and certain creatures only drop certain ones as you proceed in the game. You’re also limited by a population cap that determines how many you can summon, but this can be raised by finding special objects that your Minions can carry back to your Tower.
Your Minions work with only the most basic of behaviors, depending on you to take command. They’ll attack barricades, doors, destroy barrels and chests for goodies, and the bad guys. Whatever you direct them to, they’ll do their best to follow your bidding. But they’re not exactly the brightest torches in the dungeon and can get hung up wrecking stuff that they bump into when you really want them to just charge ahead and attack. This can really get annoying in later levels when a lot of things are thrown at you and you just want them to head in one direction. You can lock onto an enemy and direct your minions directly to them, but that requires you to work with the wonky aiming system that makes navigating through a cluttered scene more work than it’s worth as you might find yourself clicking for the right target.
When more Minion types join your cause, you can summon a combination of colors to create a small and diverse army of darkness. You can focus on controlling only a certain color, sending out Green assassins ahead of the main body of your force to assault hard-to-kill targets, for example, or lead them all in for one huge attack. You can also leave Minions in guard mode, by pointing at and creating a guard point that you can also move around. You can set up separate guard points and move the Minions gathered around them on the field to protect certain areas or to take up position for an ambush. I only wish there was a better way of controlling how many Minions you can assign to a guard point, or in being able to more easily remove a few from one.
Minions will also arm and armor themselves with whatever they find, whether it’s pumpkin heads, rat heads, clubs, skeletal arms, slug pods, axes, or pieces of metal they fashion into makeshift armor. This adds to their overall effectiveness and makes each one deadlier than they would be as a fresh recruit, at least until they die. They can also be used to carry deadly items such as bombs that you find to surprise foes with, or be used to crank open doors or carry items around to where they need to go. As the Overlord, you need not get your gauntleted hands dirty with such menial tasks, such as the puzzles that lie in wait for you.
Guiding your minions and choosing the right ones will test your command ability as you piece together broken turnstiles, push blocks of stone, and get into hard to reach places to pillage and steal what you can. The puzzles aren’t that hard to figure out, but protecting your minions as they try to do what you command can sometimes be a tricky challenge.
Well Dressed Dictator
But while your Minions are what you will be using for most every nefarious deed, as the Overlord you also have a few personal options that you can exercise for when you get tired of using the remote control for evil. You can fight, for one thing, wading into the midst of blood curdling battle to help your Minions or get in a few cheap shots against the bosses that you will inevitably face. A “Corruption Level” is also tracked to see how evil you can get. Taking out villagers that say the wrong thing or keeping certain treasures to yourself are sure ways to build this up and affect what spells you may as well as change the look of your Tower and yourself. But being evil does have some limits, one of which is being unable to jump or hop down low ledges because it might make you look like a bunny hopping sissy.
As you travel the land spreading chaos and destruction, you’ll also stumble upon plenty of treasure that you can use to customize your Tower after reaching a certain point in the story. Need a new throne? It’s yours for the right price. Change the banners? Do it, and the land will tremble beneath your colors. There are quite a few fancy things that you can get for your evil domicile, but there’s not a whole lot of variety nor is there a way to bring in a more personal touch to some things such as being able to design your own flag. And if you want a statue of yourself in the local village, or force your villagers to grow more pumpkins for your greater glory, you’ll be disappointed to know that your beautification projects are focused only on your Tower. No marking of territory here.
Your hard stolen gold is also used in forging armor and weapons for yourself which, in a way, doesn’t make much sense since you’re the one running the forge. Anyway, you’ll eventually be able to recover Forges that you can bring back to the Tower to begin crafting your own equipment that suspiciously make you look almost like Sauron from Peter Jackson’s LOTR. There are three of these powerful tools, each one progressively providing even more powerful metals to work with as well as allowing for a greater capacity in how many Minions you can stuff into each finished product.
As the Overlord, it is your privilege to decide how many of each Minion you can feed into the Forge and each color determines what the effects will be…as long as there’s enough room in what you are making. The more Browns that you infuse into your armor, the more of a protective bonus it will get, for example. Or, you can mix together Browns and Blues for stronger armor with some regenerative ability if that’s what you want instead. If there’s room left afterwards, you can upgrade it with more Minions until it reaches its maximum limit. Equipment that you swap out is stored, allowing you to change into armor, helmets, and switch weapons if you have a collection going.
As your Tower improves, other options will open up such as the Dungeon which serves as a proving ground for your skills and that of your Minions. There, you can fight all of the monsters that had the misfortune of meeting their end at your hands and can provide a decent source of easy to get life force as long as you don’t die in the process. But not to worry, the Overlord is immortal. If you die, you will return to the Tower from where you can march back out again. During your travels, if you need to be healed up or your magic recharged, you can also return to the Tower on your own for your fix.
Magic will also become part of your arsenal as you discover additional spells. Some will help your Minions become more effective evildoers for a time, while others will give you some protection. All of these will draw upon your store of magic which can also be improved by finding special objects and returning them to your Tower. Before long, you’ll be able to command a considerable batch of spells that can easily tilt whatever fight you find yourself in to your vile advantage.
Not Quite Pure Concentrated Evil
As you explore the unnamed land of Overlord, you’ll discover that this isn’t a game of serious evil, such as what you can wage as the bad guys in the Battle for Middle Earth RTS series for Lord of the Rings, or even for what you could do in Fable or Knights of the Old Republic. Instead, you’ll be treated to a humorous and light hearted take on foul machinations that are more along the lines of Monty Python or Spaceballs, serving up Evil Lite with an umbrella and a lemon. There’ll be no raising taxes on the populace, crushing revolts against your name, corrupting good people to do evil, or “convincing” neighboring rulers to bow to your will. If you’re looking to be a virtual dictator, this game won’t really satisfy a more subtle craving for mad power.
Sure, you can go wicked and destroy everything in sight, ruthlessly hoard the treasures of the land, and show no mercy to those that beg forgiveness, but most everyone and everything that you’re fighting against is already evil. There are times when you are presented with a choice to be dastardly evil, such as keeping all of the food for yourself instead of giving it to the villagers, but these are offered only at certain moments. More opportunities would have been welcome including plenty of little things to bring out that evil feeling, such as watching the pretty blue skies overhead fill with black clouds that blot out the sun, evil shadows spread across the land, and being able to see your Tower shine in the distance like a beacon of the damned. The dead even walk, but for some reason, you can’t have them join your army which would have made it, well, REALLY evil.
The bosses of the game, the former heroes of the land, aren’t even the kind of snobby, arrogant, goody-two shoe glitter queens that can get under your skin to make you want to teach them a lesson. They’re corrupted to the core, setting you up for a twenty or so hour marathon of one-upmanship as you rebuild your domain which doesn’t seem very evil. For much of the game, it can feel as if Overlord cautiously dances around the very idea it is trying to entertain you with while offering you the occasional carrot.
This isn’t helped by the linear story and half hearted voice acting for most everyone aside from your evil Minions, although the graphics bring much of the world to vivid life whether it’s a medieval town populated by morons or the fields of dried grass that bend in your passing or burn violently at your hands. The title’s humor has a few funny moments, but jokes can get tired with others sounding pretty forced and even cliched. Drunk dwarves, effeminate elves, and idiot townspeople run the rut of RPG stereotypes that you’ll run into here. Don’t expect a lot of deep characterization to match the exciting action that the Minions bring to the gameplay.
But while your Minions can be expected to be a little dense, your enemies can often be just as smart, especially the wicked heroes that provide the boss encounters in the game. Most foes will simply run at you, some will force you to try and think how best to deal with them with your Minions, but most of the boss battles are pretty weak. One boss even stood where he was while being pelted with fireballs from my Reds who happened to find a “sweet” spot that he didn’t react against.
The levels in the game can also tend to space their spawns and Tower gates pretty far apart, making you run from point to point in case you run out of Minions or if your Minions are carrying something back to the gate for delivery. Although it doesn’t ruin the gameplay, it can get annoying having to wait for your Minions to cart off something before rejoining you or having to find a specific Minion Gate to get past a puzzle later on.
The save system isn’t the best, either. When you step into new areas and at certain points in each dungeon, the game autosaves your progress. There’s no way to make a manual save, unless you decide to go to your Tower and leave the game from there at which point it will ask if you want to save. You can change autosave slots if you want to keep a collection of saves that you want to go back to, but the lack of any real save mechanic that picks up right where you left off in the field is evil in itself. No matter where your last autosave was, when you continue, you’ll start off at the Tower anyway. At least it saves what treasures you’ve collected up to that point.
Multiplayer Madness
Overlord comes with a few multiplayer options for those that want to share their evil with the world at large. There’s Slaughter, which competing Overlords try to score points by killing creatures or by taking down the competition. Pillage is a race for treasure, with the winner being the one that has the largest horde. And Survival is a co-op mode that puts two Overlords together to try and survive the onslaught that they’ll be facing. If you have a need to try this out online or at a LAN, you’ve got the option.
Powermad
It doesn’t quite bring out the worst that other titles have already done when it comes to being bad, but it easily provides plenty of opportunities for mindless havoc with an army of fanatical followers that are as much to watch as they are to send after your foes. The trip through this twisted fairy tale can still find ways to bring a tear to an evil eye as you decide how ruthless you might want to be with your army leading the way, changing how the ending may play out depending on your wickedness…or lack thereof. Although the humor can get tired and the story predictable, it’s the sheer amount of mayhem that you can deal out with a personal army of your own that doesn’t get old as you prove to the world that you are the one and only Overlord.
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5 Responses to “Overlord (PC)”
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Could you pls tell me how to change spells during the play. I am stuck with fire ball spells only though i have collected other spell items also but dont know how to change it.
Please Help,
Thanking you.
ALI
ALI THE ANSWER IS F1,F2,F3,F4
well how do you do it for the xbox?
On the xb360 you need to use the movement buttons to change around spells oh once your spells get up graded 4 instance a fire ball spell turns into a flamthrower spell you can’t get back the ariginal fire ball spell unless you want to start new game
Could anybody describe where you find the slow spell for the pc version?
Ive looked in every nook and cranny inbetween the gates of Spree and the halflings’s village but cannot find it- any ideas?