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Review

Overlord II

8.0

Format Xbox 360

Developer Triumph Studios

Publisher Codemasters

Genre Puzzle, Action

22-Jun-2009 Dominate, destroy and squish gnomes beneath your feet

6 Comments

Here's a game about being evil. So evil, in fact, that the game's Fable-style morality slider doesn't go from "good" to "bad", but instead oscillates evilly between two different flavours of absolute evil.

In Overlord II you're forced into wickedness by taking on the role of a hellish commander of a vast minion army. That, and the fact that everyone else in the world, from the gluttonous Empire to the tree-hugging elves, is thoroughly unlikeable.

Triumph's action-strategy RPG will be familiar territory for fans of the original. Overlord II isn't spectacularly different from the first title. It sees you once again exploring and terrorising a faux-fantasy world while controlling dozens of underlings in the style of Pikmin, with the right analogue stick sweeping them hither and tither.

These scurrying critters are an extension of your overlord - pillaging, looting, ganging up on enemies, operating switches and wisecracking in a wonderfully inoffensive and pleasing way.

For creatures you'll spend every second of the game staring at and chaperoning about the place they're fantastic company, obediently retrieving treasure, life force and other detritus before dropping it giddily at your demonic feet. You'll only have to raise a chitinous digit to have something brutally maimed.

Fable's clearly a touchstone here, certainly visually and to some degree structurally. You're rebuilding the dark dominion from your seat of power in the Netherworld, which in real terms means carrying out quests, collecting treasure, improving your character and discovering new minions. The world here is larger and more open than before, and there'll be the option to backtrack with your different minion types to discover new areas and reap more resources.

Four kinds of minion give rise to some interesting tactical variations. Your browns are your basic foot soldier, reds are weaker but can hurl fireballs and set fire to objects, blues are your spellcasting medics, and greens are the stealthy sort. This time around they've learned to ride mounts too.

Wolves turn your browns into rank-breaking, blood-thirsty battering rams, greens on giant spiders can scale walls, while mounted fire salamanders are mobile flamethrowers capable of flushing out gnome holes, something which you'll come to care a lot about.

You'll invariably grow attached to minions (usually as soon as one finds a shiny hat or something equally distinguishing), and where previously your deceased buddies were condemned to rot in the ground, you can now resurrect the dead 'uns, with their weapons, from the minion graveyard. Handy, considering every one of the hundreds of ghoulish peons now has a name and can level up, as well as earn titles based on their deeds.

After the first level you'll have a troop of veteran Seal Clubbers you won't want to let go of.

Groups of minions can be divided by both colour and mount, though such pernickety strategising lies on the other side of some rather clunky manoeuvring. Need to station some fire salamanders above a crevasse? A slightly cumbersome few button presses and a swift sweep of the right stick do get it done. Eventually.

Overlord II's complexity can sometimes leave you thumb-tied and Triumph's reworked camera system, in which they've dutifully attempted to cram both camera and minion control onto the same stick (that's what we get for complaining the first time), can lead to some frustrating outcomes.

They're passing grievances though, and once you've wrestled the game mechanics into submission you'll find that the problems don't run much deeper than that - unless you begin to compare the relatively twee brand of pantomime "evil" on display here to things like drug abuse and warcrimes and realise that the whole thing's not half as evil as they're letting on.

But let's be realistic, that sort of thing wouldn't really fit on the game's morality slider. There are few titles that are as charming as Overlord II, and only in this distorted fantasy world could playing the bad guy be so fun, engaging and - most importantly - guiltless.

OXM Staff