Gamer Savings Time: Overlord Review

Overlord 2 comes out in about 10 days so lets take a look at the original.   Overlord is Pikmin with a twisted sense of humor and a traditional fantasy setting. Its good, but things have gone awry.

I loved Pikmin and Pikmin 2. So, when I played the Overlord demo, and saw that it was pretty much the same concept I got really excited. Overlord is a hardcore gamer friendly fantasy version of Pikmin that has your character taking the role of a savior or a tyrant.

The game play is built around your overlord character using different colored minions to perform everything from heavy lifting to attacking enemies. Each minion color has a different skill set (examples: Red is immune to Fire, Green is immune to poison, Brown, are good fighters, Etc.) with the most of them being super useful. However, the Blue minions are about friggin’ pointless. If you’ve played Pikmin, then you see how this is identical to the premise of that game.

Just like in Pikmin, it is very easy to lose to boat load of minions very quickly if you don’t know how to fight a certain enemy. You really have to use the Rock, Paper, Scissors technique on most enemies before finding out which attack will best kill each one.

What bothers me most about your tiny little assistants is that this Minions are stupidly helpless.  They will go out of their way to pick up armor or a weapon to fight with but not think twice about parking themselves under an enemy that is obviously going to squash them.

Also, the functions of the minions don’t match the actions that the minions actually take.  IE, Blue minions are poor (and by poor I mean worthless) fighters, but they can heal dead minions.  If you sweep (move) a group of blue minions into an area with both fallen minions and enemies, their first instinct is going to be to fight the enemies and abandon the dead even though that is not what they are best suited for.

Small things like that make Overlord harder than it has to be.  Also, the game is super glitchy, and buggy. Numerous times, I found my minions getting stuck behind fallen rocks or fences. This renders them unusable and if you are running short on minions this poses a huge problem (having 8 stuck in a wall and what not).

Minions are also used as sacrifices for weapon and armor up grades.  Sacrificing them is easy but to do but the ingredients that you need to do the upgrades are way too high.  The smelting to upgrade your shields, minion count and weapons is a very annoying process.  Not only do you have to have a massive amount of cash, but you also have to have a massive amount of minions (upwards of thousands.)

Anyone willing to put that much time into gathering minions just to upgrade your weapons really needs to go back to the game store and find something else to play.  Besides, I was able complete the entire story with very few weapon upgrades.

The multiplayer is weak and you WILL have trouble finding people online to complete with.  Also, players online tend to hang you out to dry simply trying to get the handful of accessible achievements in multiplayer.

The good news is that the game is genuinely funny and really long with a good amount of bonus content. Many of the achievements are unrealistic, but satisfying.  The facelessness of the main character makes the focus on the minions and side characters much stronger. I liked Overlord but there are many things that need to be fixed before Overlord 2.

[2.5/5.0] Stars