Red minions are impervious to fire and can put out fires as well. Red minions are also attack their enemies wifh fireballs. Red minions should be used at long distances and be marked to specific strategic points using the Guard Marker. The fire thrown on enemies can set some of them alight causing continuous damage for as long as they are burning.

Green minions are referred to the "assasin" of the minion groups. Green minion should be taken behind an enemy to take it rather than right in front of it. Green minions are also impervious to posion. They can also turn invisible, however their rotten smell may expose them to the enemy, so the invisibility may only work on some enemies like trolls that can't tell the difference. On the larger enemies the green minions will jump on to the monster's back if they get around behind it. On the back the minions are able to deal more damage than brown minions.

The blue minions are you water minions, being the only group of minions that can go in water. Blue minions also boast the power of being impervious to magic spells and being able to revive dead minions. They are also the only minion that can deal damage to magical enemies, such as Dead Elves.

Aside from the brown minions, each other group of minions, red, green, and blue, need to have their hive obtained before the Overlord will able to summon more of them or use them for his benefit. Obtaining the minions basically requires the Overlord to go into a cave where the minions have been living and follow them to their hive and acquire it and return it to the tower. Once acquired the Overlord is now in control of that group of minions.

Minions also can get the Overlord gold and treasure, such as health, in battle. Simply deploy the minions and they will take what ever they find if useful to them such as a weapon, or gold for the Overlord. Minions do obtain there own weapons and armor that makes them stronger in battle. Over time upgrades are able to be bought for the minions that will make their attacks stronger and defense better.

Gameplay

The game primarily consists of you controlling the new Overlord in his quest to establish his evil dominion across the land. Despite being all powerfull the only three things the Overlord can actually do is move, attack and control his minions. The minions are your primary tool throughout the game and are used in everything from combat to solving puzzles. While playing the game you collect two main resources; lifeforce and gold. Gold is used to buy new weapons and upgrades for your evil tower. While lifeforce is used to spawn minions for you to control. There are four different types of lifeforce in the game, with their respective colours corresponding to the minion of the same colour. Each colour lifeforce is stored seperately in its own pool, so you can only spawn as many minions  of a certain colour as you have lifeforce for it. At the beginning of the game the Overlord is quite weak and can suffer large amounts of damage quickly if attacked by a large number of enemies, so you rely on the minions a lot.

Control of the minions is dealt with three different inputs. You can manually control the movement of the horde by the right anolouge stick. By locking on to something you can tell the minions to attack it by pressing the right trigger. And holding down the B button recalls all of your minions back to yourself. As you progress through the game you will find more upgrades for your castle. these allow you acces to a dungeon where you can fight any creature you or your minions have killed, a bedroom for your mistress where you can buy asthetic upgrades for your tower, and a forge. The forge system in the game uses your minions to upgrade your equipment. By sacrificing a minions you can gain different benifits depending on the colour of minion sacrificed.

Overlord also has online multiplayer consisting of three main game modes; slaughter, pillage and survival. In slaughter you fight against an opposing Overlord in a race to score as many points as possible by killing as many monster in a time limit, this also can include killing the opposing Overlord and his minions. In pillage players compete in a race against time to collect a target amount of gold before your opponent does. In survival, two player team up to fight of waves of enemies of ever increasing difficulty for as long as possible. The game ends as soon as one player dies. The expansion to Overlord entitled Rising Hell added a new multiplayer mode called Protect Your Power. This mode plays similar to survival except you must make sure that the enemies do not destroy the object posing as your so called power.