Overlord 2

Rating: T

Score: 5.5/10

There’s a lot of games that let you play as a hero, but few that let you play as a villain. This is one of those games. Sounds like a blast to have the game let you cause total chaos, but is it? This game is available on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

The story is that a bunch of goblin-like minions don’t have a master to follow, so they go find one. They can’t just buy one, though, they need to watch around and find someone with an evil heart cause chaos and destruction to lead them. They find an unnamed child who’s idea of a good time is frightening small children in a small town, until he gets kicked out and frozen in ice. The minions unfreeze him and as he ages he gets the title “Overlord”, to control all the minions and cause chaos with an army.

The core gameplay is a RTS (Real-Time Strategy, a genre in which you controls a large army to attack a specific thing/spot) with action-adventure mixed in: Action because the Overlord can attack too, and adventure because the small, linear levels often can be explored to a minor degree. It works well, at least the Action and Adventure parts do. The RTS need some work, since there’s no depth to “select all minions to attack everything”. Where’s the strategy? In the likely event some minions die, you can resurrect them from a hole in the ground. There’s no cost, so there’s nothing stopping you from just rushing all your minions at everything, as opposed to gingerly attacking every enemy like the instruction book so obviously wants you to.

There are four types of minions: brown melee-fighters, red fireball-throwers, green invisible ones, and blue healers. They all have strengths and weaknesses, and don’t worry, “select all” works on all of them very effectively. That’s really the only thing that matters.

Yes, they are all color-coded, much like Pikmin on the Gamecube. In fact, this game could be considered a complete rip-off, but I don’t think they stole that much from Pikmin. They both use many different monster that look similar and are all color-coded, they both have the same “select all and attack everything” concept, and both you can get more monsters fairly easily. There are probably more similarities, but it’s been so long since I played Pikmin that it seems more or less a complete blur. It’s been 5 years since the last Pikmin game.

One thing Pikmin doesn’t have is a leader than can use magic. Not that it matters, your minions kill anything you send them to kill. So, the only reason to even attack at all is if you’re trying to speed run through the level, in which case you’ll find the Overlord’s sword is much more powerful than all of your minions attacking combined. Too bad you’re too slow to capitalize on your strength; your minions will have killed the enemies before you can get there.

Another thing you’ll notice is the fact being evil isn’t as fun when the game not only let’s you be chaotic, but it WANTS you to be chaotic. It’s better when being evil is the alternative, but the game doesn’t want you to be evil. It lets you mock the game, let it know you’re in control. When the game starts congratulating you on killing billions of people, then it’s not nearly as satisfying. You might start thinking it’s trying reverse-psychology, it wants you to be nice to everyone, to rebel against evil. By that time, you’re thinking to hard about a mindless video game.

It’s not horrible, but it’s not original or satisfying either. It has it all: unoriginality, bad camera, tedious gameplay, and a hard-to-control army of freaks. What this game shouldn’t have is a sequel, one is quite enough.