Rarely does a game come along that successfully ties together multiple genres, but Overlord has done just that. Overlord combines Action, RPG, and RTS elements into a fun, ransacking romp through a fantasy land.
Overlord has been out for a few weeks and deserves a 2old2play review because it’s one of those titles that is easily overlooked. It lacked any type of hype that other games have had and the first time many of us even heard of it was when the demo was released on Marketplace to download (so we recommend you download it and give it a go).
The game is about the reign of your character, the Overlord. You’ll start out with low level steel items, an axe, helmet and armor. You’ll also have the ability to control 10 brown minions at your disposal. This is where the RPG elements come into play, because you’ll increase all these stats as you play the game. To buy decorations for your castle and new items, you’ll need gold. To increase your health, mana, get spells and increase your horde numbers, you’ll need to find objects in the world and return them to your castle. Lastly to make minions, you’ll need to harvest life force from killing sheep, beetles, rats, peasants, frogs and various other living creatures in the world.
The Gear in Overlord is also something that follows the RPG genre. For Overlord items you can forge a helmet, armor and a few different types of weapons, all of which will cost you some amount of money. There are three different types of metals you can use to forge your items: Steel, Durium and Arcanium . Different metals are unlocked by finding their associated forges which are throughout the land. Steel is found early in the game, Durium mid game and Arcanium late game. Besides being able to forge items, you can also imbue them with magic by sacrificing your minions into the smelter when you forge your weapon. Different minions have different effects on each item. For example, red minions will add fire damage to your weapon while brown minions will increase total damage. Green minions on armor will give you health regeneration and on your helmet the type of minion you use doesn’t matter since the helmet just lets you control more minions the more imbue to your helmet. It's a lot like socketing an item in many MMORPG's
The Minions
The minions are by far the most entertaining part of the game, they all have different personalities and powers. You start out with Browns which are your main fighters in the game and contain the most damage and health. You can also unlock Greens, Blues and Reds by rescuing their hive's and bringing it back to your tower. Rescuing the hive usually involves some time challenge, the Blue hive missions we played seemed to take an hour which was by far the longest. Reds are weak but they are your ‘archers’ and have a throwing fireball attack which sets sheep ablaze and is very powerful in numbers. They also eat fire to put out blazes so you can get through a blocked pathway. Greens can walk through poison gas and eat poison plants clearing the path for you. They also have a swarming attack where they jump on the backs of an enemy and stab it. Blues are the only minions that can attach magical beings and walk through water. The Green, Blue and Red minions are really specialty minions and are pretty weak so you need to use them strategically.
Minions are all scavengers, they will pickup anything on the ground if it’s better than what they have. There’s plenty of boxes, barrels, houses and various other things to ransack to find items, gold, health and manna potions. Your minions can even find something to wear in a pumpkin patch. If you send them into one and they have no helmet currently, some will come out of the pumpkin patch wearing a jack o lantern on their head. Various times I’ve had to maneuver my minions around to try and get a look at one that’s got something weird on to just try and figure out what it found. There are also various places in the game that have alcohol for your minions to drink which will make them intoxicated and they’ll proceed to wee in the streets accompanied by an Ahhhh. As you can tell, having hordes of minions is where a lot of the entertainment value is in the game.
Choices
You can play the game as a good Overlord or a bad Overlord and your missions with vary slightly depending on which path you’re taking. For this review I’m evil, so I’m killing peasants, keeping gold and food I’m sent to retrieve and ransacking houses. Even the sacred Elf Tree wasn’t safe from my fireball, I lit the entire garden up in a blaze of smoke. After killing everyone in Spree and ransacking every house, I was offered a sacrifice and received a mission to find and enslave 10 maidens throughout the first map of the game as keepers for my tower. So you find the maidens, beat them down and the minions carry them off kicking and screaming to your tower. Fun times.
The Game Play
The game itself is all mission driven. As you plunder the land, you’ll come across various people and beings that will trigger the missions for you. The game has four main map areas all connecting to each other. Plus in those areas are a few major story progression spots which will load another map specifically for the mission you’re involved in. For example there’s "find the food" mission for Spree in which you get to the Halfling fillage, find a Halfling home, and when you go into it, it loads a fairly large map of the homes all linked together. Each major section of the game is passed by defeating one of the seven bosses and the game concludes after you’ve dispatched the seventh one.
Be Martha Stewart
Your tower is also a work in progress. When you start the game it’s in ruins. However as you find objects out in the world, they not only have an affect on your Overlord but they also affect the tower. You’ll see how many health, manna and minion objects you’ve collected as they stack up behind your throne. When you get your first forge, the forge level will open up and this is where you make, imbue and change your items. There’s a dungeon which is an arena battle and when you take a maiden, the upstairs will open up which has a treasure room and a customization room where you order decorations and such for your tower.
But What About The Magic?
The last part of the game is magic. When you start, you have no magic spells. There are however magic items in the world for you to have your minions bring back to the tower. There are four different spells in total and fireball you will get almost right away. Just as it sounds, it lets you target and shoot a fireball at an enemy or object. Others such as Shield, allows you to cast a shield around yourself which will drain manna as you get hit until you completely run out, then you start taking health damage. There’s also a spell that amps up your minion’s defense and power to make them super deadly, especially the Browns.
What About My Friends!
As if the single player wasn’t enough hours of fun, there are three multiplayer modes as well. Survival mode is a co-op game in which you and a partner team up for 30 minutes to take on various numbers of the lands creatures. The map has minion spawn points for all the different colors as well as health and manna regeneration fountains. As time goes on the size and quantity of the creatures amps up and by the time you get to 27 minutes, you should just stop fighting and run around trying to survive the last few minutes. It’s very challenging.
Pillage mode is a race against your opponent to ransack as much money’s worth of stuff you can in a set amount of time. The winner is the person with the biggest monetary total at the end of the clock.
Slaughter mode is a race for points. You get points for capturing items, killing creatures, harvesting life force and killing your opponent. This is another time based game in which the person with the most points at the end of the game is the winner.
While these modes are fun, there isn’t a lot of variety here. Achievements are overwhelmingly long to get in multiplayer since they’re all rank based (except Survival which is tough). Ranked games are 10 minutes in length and you’re awarded an achievement for 1, 10 and 50 wins. So to get 50 wins in both VS modes, you’re looking at 1000 minutes (or ~17 hours) of winning gameplay time.
Overall
Overlord is an excellent game that shouldn’t be overlooked. It’s quite different from what’s out there currently and a lot of fun to play. While multiplayer doesn’t offer a lot, single player is hours of enjoyment. The only complaint I came up with during this review was trying to manage the movement of multiple colors of minions in a precise and time sensitive way. Especially for boss battles which can become quite challenging. Most of the time it’s recommended you walk around with Browns and call in the other colors for specific tasks that require their talents. The other thing that wasn’t clear is how to save. Every time a warp gate opens up, the screen says ‘saving’. However it’s not really saving your game progress, only that you’ve opened a new gate. In order to save your game, you have to use the gate to go back to your tower and exit the game in the tower, when you exit, it will ask if you’d like to save your game. This save actually saves you’re progress.
Overall we give this game an 8. It’s not to be overlooked and the demo is free to download and try before you buy. Though it only gives you a taste of what the game has in store, it was enough to sell me on it immediately.
