	Overlord
	Developer: Triumph Studios Publisher: Codemasters Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-2	Words By:
Whenever you play an RPG you’re always cast as the pure of heart, noble hero. But haven’t you ever wanted to be the bad guy? Who hasn’t wanted to be like Sauron or Darth Vader, villains so powerful they always need big hordes of good guys to take them down? Everyone knows bad guys are more fun, as they don’t have to play by the rules. Overlord throws said rulebook straight out the window and into the abyss with this humorous puzzler. The story begins as you’re dug out from the rubble of the old Overlord’s tower after his defeat. The minions declare you their new master and you start the task of gaining control of the lands again. And cleaning up your house - the heroes left it in a bit of a state… Everything in Overlord has this tongue-in-cheek air about it, and nothing is ever taken seriously for more than a few seconds. The humour comes in many forms, from the chatter of your minions or advisor to the way the world is portrayed, which is the best part of the game. In Overlord common RPG knowledge is turned on its head as demons are ‘cute little things’, halflings are evil and corrupt and even Unicorns are portrayed as bloodthirsty killers! Whenever you approach a villager you’re treated like a hero, even when you demolish their barn or kill all their livestock! Even small touches, like an easy listening classical soundtrack as you trudge through the darkest dungeons, portray a world where either evil is seen as good, or suggest that there is more to good and evil than what we take at face value. Nevertheless, you can’t help but chuckle when a villager says in a West Country accent that he’ll “name a pumpkin after you”. When moving around you have direct control your Overlord character, but using him for combat is best avoided: this is a job best suited to your army of minions! There are four types of minion, which you unlock over time and all have their own special talents: Brown minions are the all-rounders, Reds are for ranged attacks, Greens are for ambushes and Blues are the healers. After you unlock them all you have to juggle the different types of minions fairly equally to get past each puzzle or set of enemies. What is impressive is the level of interactivity between your minions and the environment: they can smash, kill and steal just about anything! If you’re outside you can sweep your minions across a farm and like a little brown tornado of destruction they will smash pumpkins, plates, carts, boxes and kill any livestock nearby. They’ll even drink any beer that’s lying around and generally arse around! They can equip themselves with any weapons or armour that enemies drop, but also anything they find useful; some of my minions were attacking with severed arms and pumpkin helmets! They can also retrieve health pickups and treasure, smiling gleefully as they present them to you “for the maasssster!” Bless their little hearts... Overlord’s gameplay consists of a good mix of puzzles and combat - as there is very little strategy required for combat this is predominantly a puzzle-based game. You’ll have a lot of fetch/protect/kill missions, but they are always accompanied by a funny storyline and enough differences to keep you playing through. The game rarely loses pace - as you finish one quest another one is just around the corner for you to find. Although it’s not as free-roaming as Fable (which it has been compared to), the game does a good job of making sure you still go back to the first lands in the game even when you’re hours in. The main way they do this is with element-based puzzles. All minions are vulnerable to the elements, but reds are immune to fire, blues to water and greens to poison. At various points in the game you’ll be faced with element-based items blocking your path, which require you to use the appropriate minion to diffuse the item and carry on. Unfortunately this seems to be overused and gets a little tedious, especially compared to the other puzzles which feel original and fresh. Control of the minions is fairly simple - you lock on to an enemy with the left trigger and send minions with the right. You can manually control the minions with the right analogue stick and set hold points with ‘Y’. After you send some minions to an area and hold it (for an ambush or ranged attack) you can switch between the different minion types too, which makes co-ordinating an attack quite easy to do in real-time. That’s not to say that the controls are flawless, because they are anything but. The lock-on system is a problem because it only locks onto the enemy you are facing and there’s no way of toggling between multiple enemies, which turns organised attacks into disorderly scraps because you can’t set your minions on the enemy you might wish to. The minion’s pathfinding is also prone to screwing up, with consequent back-tracking which can be annoying. When you combine this with the minions’ vulnerability to certain elements you’ll quickly find (to your frustration) that in Overlord minions will walk into fireplaces and lakes far more than you would like them too. And if you try to manually move them there will always be one minion who gets stuck while the others are across the river. Let go of the analogue stick to release the one minion and the rest walk back to you and into the river… Another point to mention is that because the minions are mapped to the right analogue stick and dominate the shoulder buttons there is no way to control the camera. Admittedly this was only a problem for me a couple of times but it does make navigating areas like the swamps quite awkward. Overlord is one of the most original games I’ve had to review on the 360. It brings back memories of Abe’s Odyssey for the Playstation and borrows things from a crate load of games that I like. The puzzles are fun and not too taxing and the minions are fun to storm around the countryside with. The humour of the game is its strong point and appeals to pretty much all ages (especially immature adults like me). It’s just a shame the camera and control system don’t do quite what they’re supposed to do and tarnish what is otherwise very good game.

Best Bits
- Nice Graphics
- Original gameplay
- Good puzzles
- Great humour throughout

Worst Bits
- Fire/water/poison thing gets repetitive
- Awkward camera
- Fiddly controls and dodgy pathfinding


by: Crazypunk