Overlord

Chris Livingstone has been waxing lyrical about the Overlord 2 demo. I’ve always been aware that Overlord existed in a faint way. I seem to remember Rhiana Pratchett reviewed it for PC Zone, which may be a bit unfair because I believe she helped write it. Anyway, if Livingstone likes it, the chances are that I will so I thought I’d try out Overlord as Overlord 2 isn’t out for a few months.

Oh boy.

Overlord is a weird hybrid of Action RPG and RTS. You play an evil emperor who has upgradable armour, spells, health and so on but you’re not exactly Altair in the combat stakes. For that you have your minions. You start off with five basic minions and you acquire more as you go on. I had thirty five minions of various types running around after me by the time I had finished and I’m sure I could have picked up more if I’d been paying attention.

Overlord’s big selling point was its knowing attitude towards high fantasy. I hate High Fantasy, I think it’s a dead genre that no-one has done anything decent with for years. Overlord takes the tired clichés that litter every example of the genre that I can think of and gleefully subverts them. You spend the first act gleefully clubbing hobbits to death, then move up to Elves, Dwarves and everything in between.

The game plays constantly with the nature of evil. There aren’t really any “good” options in the game. You are, for example, tasked with rescuing a supply of food for a nearby village. To do this, you work your way through a hobbit village, slaughtering everything you encounter. Once you find the food store, you can either keep it for yourself or return it to the village. Oddly, returning it to the village is the more evil thing to do as it keeps the villagers alive so you can enslave them more effectively.

Having said that, these choices are almost all cosmetic. Once you’ve decided to be evil or really evil, nothing really affects your progress. Characters attitudes towards you change (often hilariously) but you’re never presented with extra manna or anything, as far as I could tell.

I’m not sure that this is a bad thing, however. Moral choices, as Daniel Floyd pointed out, are never actual choices in games because they always reward one choice more than the other, thus negating the morality and making it more about economics. Here, you don’t gain anything by helping the villagers other than their thanks and you don’t really gain anything from stealing their food. It’s just fucking hilarious.

Overlord’s main plot is.... pretty reasonable and there are more than enough brilliant side quests to keep you entertained. The moral choice aspect makes keeps things interesting as well. I’ll definitely be playing it through again so I can see how things would have turned out if, for example, I’d abandoned my loyal wife for a goth girl I came across in a dungeon somewhere.

As far as the main quests go... there are a few very grindy ones. There are no objective markers so often it’s not entirely clear where the hell you’re supposed to be going. I spent half an hour wandering around a Dwarf Village before working out that I was supposed to enter a prison cell I’d opened to allow the game to progress. These moments are rare, but they’re bloody annoying when they do happen.

What does make up for the grind are the fun ways you can solve some quests. For example, I was charged with killing some feral unicorns by some elves because the unicorns were preventing them from worshiping at a sacred tree in the middle of a grove. I was a little short on minions at the time and so rather than charge in and risk death, I set fire to the meadow which burned up the unicorns as well as the sacred tree. The Elves cried. It was fantastic.

What else is there to say? Well the controls work very well (on PC at least, I’m told they’re quite badly broken on the consoles. Har har.) There’s a good amount of content so It’s good value for money... The graphics aren’t that good and I came across a couple of bugs here and there but overall, I’d definitely recommend it. Check out the demo on Steam.