I recently completed Overlord (the 360 version). Released on 6/26/07, the game is very similar to Pikmin, however instead of playing a lost alien trying to rebuild his spaceship you play an evil Overlord trying to rebuild his tower. You control an army of minions comprised of four different types, each having separate abilities. The game consists mostly of exploration with some light puzzle play as you figure out how to use the specific skills of your minions to overcome enemies. Also, like Fable, you can make choices throughout the game that have an effect on how evil you are. Find the village's lost supplies and keep them for yourself? Or return them to the village?
My first experience with this game came from playing the demo. I enjoyed the witty writing and the mocking take on evil game play. The graphics were good, the storyline was interesting, and the control scheme seemed well done. However, the demo is short; since you only control 10 brown minions you don't get a sense of how complicated the controls will become.
As the game progresses it became less polished and more complicated. In a late stage, a bridge had been raised in order to force me to go in a certain direction, however I could walk through the bridge and cross the gap over empty air. In another case a door that I had already opened closed when I re-entered the area but the mechanism to reopen it wasn't active. I had to return to my tower and restart the level. With another quest, I was asked to visit my mistress. I did so and received an achievement, but for the rest of the game I continued to be prompted to visit her in our chambers when she wasn't there anymore. Finally, some techniques were not clearly identified early in the game and caused me much difficulty later on. A great example of this is the ability to target a guard point and then move it with the right stick.
Forty minions are difficult to control and keep track of, and many times I lost half my army without realizing it. The game uses the directional pad to manage your spells and the right shoulder button and face buttons to manage the selection of specific minions. Spells don't have names or descriptions, so if you forget what they do or the order you got them in it's difficult to determine what the most powerful version is and how it works. Selecting minions is a difficult task to manage and can be very frsutrating. You can break your brown minions into three groups and then target a group and move it around by selecting it's way-point, however I often found my waypoints difficult to select instead of other objects in the environment. In addition, resurrected minions don't return to their waypoint and in tough battles this is something to keep track of. It does no good to have 40 minions if only 10 of them are fighting.
Overall, I enjoyed Overlord and I'd recommend it as a nice break from the steady diet of shooters on the market. The gameplay is interesting and the game is fun. The control is tough to get, but I did feel as though I mastered it eventually, albeit at the end of the game. It can be compensated for by upgrading the number of minions you can control and doesn't become an obstacle to enjoying the experience. I wish they had done more with the minion dialog (they say some funny things), but there was enough to keep me amused. I would also have liked a little more polish later in the game, but it's certainly not a deal-breaker.
To be fair, I didn't explore the multi-player content in the game. I did enjoy the single player campaign regardless of the minor issues I encountered. All-in-all, I give this game a 7 out of 10.
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