Vital Stats

Genre: RTS
Players: 1-2
Online: Multiplayer

Developer: Triumph Studios
Publisher: Codemasters
ESRB Rating: T
Release Date: 6/26/07

Platforms

• PC
• Xbox 360

Overlord is essentially Pikmin with a little more attitude and a little less polish. However, there is a dearth of console RTS games, so some roughness is easy to forgive. Just come prepared to get a little lost, a little bored, and a little frustrated.

Genres are a lot like Darwin’s Finches: environmental history shaped their modern quirks. On the Galápagos islands, this means Warbler Finches with slender beaks. On the PC, it means RTS games with keyboard/mouse controls.

Overlord is the finch from the next island over: a crazy world where RTS games evolved on consoles. Gone are any traces of pointing and clicking, and there is no micromanagement of units or resources. Instead, the strategy trades large-scale conflict for small unit tactics. Gameplay is still about directing the right units to kill the right problem, but you’re on the ground with your small team instead of commanding armies from on high.

The small team in this case consists of unruly goblins, with you as their master. The conflict is your personal bid for dominion, and the limited resource is your minions’ lives. It all sounds terribly serious, but really you’re just trying to keep your gleefully malevolent charges from dying as they stab, piss, and mock their way across the countryside.

Well, at least keep them from dying too often.

Unless it’s funny.

By Your Will
Your minions cluster just behind you by default, but they’re easily deployed. Face any direction and point, and the little goblins stream forth and do mischief to the first object they encounter. Alternately you can move your troops en masse by “sweeping” them, which gives you finer control over their exact path and position.

Diplomacy in action.

Pointing works better than sweeping because minion pathfinding is mostly reliable. However, when you try a more personal touch, the squirrelly over-the-shoulder camera makes it difficult to see what you’re doing. Fortunately, sweeping is only necessary for a handful of puzzles, so you’ll spend most of the game pointing and letting the mayhem unfold.

It also helps that martial victory is determined more by the minions you pick than the way you control them. There are four color-coded types, and each occupies a different niche. Browns are tanks, reds are ranged, greens deal epic damage, and blues can revive fallen minions. Much like assembling a raid in World of Warcraft, the right mix of roles can make or break a fight. However, unlike WoW, your minions will never leave and take the guild bank with them.

More problematic than the controls is the total absence of a map. Razing the fairytale world proceeds in a series of quests, which are thankfully stored in a log. However, Overlord harbors delusions of nonlinearity, and so will saddle you with four or five quests at a time. The illusion of freedom is always pleasant, but it evaporates when you discover that every quest in the log is mandatory. With no map or waypoint, the freedom of choice becomes the burden of memory. Worse yet, some mandatory events aren’t even logged as quests, so you’ll have to stumble into the designer’s intent to advance. Gameplay and guesswork both start with “g,” but you have to read all the way to the end.

Do You Smell Burning Gingerbread?
Nuke and pave any storybook world, and it seems like you’d fall face first into comedy. Pity that’s exactly how Overlord does it. There are certainly brilliant moments, but they’re diluted by obvious “bad is good!” jokes and long stretches of map-less wandering. It doesn’t especially help that the game is fettered by an overly simplistic morality system. So most events have two outcomes and the same number of jokes was stretched across twice as much dialog.

I’m glad they’re on our side
except for the smell

The game’s art style fares better. Too-large flowers, too-white sheep, and other storybook contrivances help the world crunch crisply beneath your boot. The technology hasn’t aged with particular grace, but minor graphical marring doesn’t seriously undermine the style’s coherence.

Better than the writing and the art is the game’s overall atmosphere, though it’s a little hard to pin down. It might be your minions’ gleeful exclamations as they charge into battle and return with gold. Maybe it’s the destructible environment where everyone and nearly everything can be bludgeoned, cut, and burnt for profit. It could also be the Disney music they juxtapose against an orgy of violence.

Whatever it is, playing Overlord is funnier than its writing, more fun than its mechanics, and more impressive than its production values. It’s genuinely fun to command simpering minions to loot and pillage a world that was built for no other purpose. This sort of novelty wears off over the course of a full-length game, but it’s good fun while it lasts.

Obey
Overlord is a set of mediocre parts that fit together extremely well. It’s the right age to be extremely cheap, so the game’s real price is its length. This, along with a variety of typical genre annoyances makes the game hard to recommend to a casual gamer, but a good fit for genre fans. Hardcore gamers will find enough game to justify the price of entry, but don’t really need to rush.

What It Costs: $15

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $10
•To The Genre Fan: $20
•To The Casual: $0 (skip)