Overlord

The story was truly epic towards the end, and the presentation of the fantasy was excellent throughout!  I loved being the worst evil villain in the world where everything about me was evil except for my deeds.  I thought I was playing the game brokenly by doing this or maybe the whole evil motif was some tongue in cheek British humour, but all that happened in the game’s fiction eventually came together in a way that was fluidly compatible with the choices that I made.  Oh, and about those choices… despite being monochromatic, the choices presented in Overlord were interesting enough to the point where I intend to play through the game again as pure evil.

The combat in Overlord is refreshing and unique enough to be considered its own genre.  It seems a bit like Pikmin at first, but the mechanics of these minions address all of the issues that plagued the annoying stuff-dying-offscreen gameplay of Pikmin.  For one thing, you can essentially set up ambushes where your minions will cling to a flag that you can remotely move around as you see fit.  And unlike Pikmin, your minions are varied enough that you can use them in functionally orthogonal ways (straight up melee, gangsta-style stealth, projectiles, medics).  You can summon all of your minions to you with the press of a button, and none of your given tasks in the game will require you to spread them out where they are supposed to do things offscreen.  So the management of your minions is intentially very local in nature, and they do a decent job of local pathfinding around terrain and hazards to get home to your current location.  The swarm-and-consume tactic may get repetitive after a while, but later parts of the game will force you to strategize.  Melee attacks in the game are evenly distributed between all affected targets, so numbers on both sides take on a somewhat RTS-like quality to them.  Some creatures are natural minion killers unless you play it smart, and you learn this pretty quickly after losing your entire crew to a single creature.  On the Xbox 360, you can walk your minions around with the right analog stick.  This is definitely a very unique mechanic that never seems to get old for me as I walk them across areas cleaning them of their useables.

I have few complaints about the game, but there are some:

I wish the choices made in the game went beyond aesthetics, more.  If I save an entire people, I want some reward for it.  If I choose a certain tower ornament, I want some resultant affect from it.  But alas, a lot of choices in the game were purely aesthetic choices.

An autosave after an accidental evil deed made me lose my perfect record permanently.  I really wish there was a manual save into a specific slot and then a quicksave for the autosave slot so that I could revert to my manual save, but alas… I wonder if the developers intentionally discouraged experimentation in the game.

I got lost often, and there was no in-game map.  A physical map does come with the box, but it would have been nice if they at least provided an evil compass or something.

Leaving a minion too far behind would result in the minion staying idle.  The local pathfinding was excellent, but there seemed to be no global pathfinding in use.  The minions had no problem following a waypoint path from a large treasure to the warp pad (possibly hand-laid by a designer), but then those same minions would linger around the warp pad until you came by to pick them up.

I wish the passive behavior of the minions was smarter.  For example, when I attack a creature with my own hand, all of my free melee minions should attack that same creature, and all of my stealth fighters should jump on the creature, all of my medics should revive any dead bodies around me… but no, I have to manually set them to these objectives because only some of them will mirror my intentions.

Annoying bug #1: Some of my weaker minions would attack some inanimate object indefinitely because they did damage below a minimum threshold to the object.  I had to call them off this object. 

Annoying bug #2: After making a huge purchase for my tower, my mistress requested to see me in my private quarters.  I went there and a cut scene played.  Nice.  Then I went back to the tower upgrade center but purchased nothing, this time.  Again, the flag to see the mistress was tripped, but this time, no cutscene happened and she wasn’t even there.  For the rest of the game, my servant would constantly remind me that my mistress is waiting for me… and there was nothing I could do about this hassling reminder of an event which had already occurred.

The complaints I have about Overlord are small beans compared to the strong positives.  I’d definitely recommend this game to anyone who is looking for something original to play.  Huge thumbs up on this one!