Great concept, poorly executed

User Rating: 7 | Overlord X360
By gaminretrostyle | Review Date:
I've been looking forward to Overlord since I first heard about it, and perhaps that's why I was so disappointed in the final product. The graphics are what you would expect from a game on the 360, and the minions are actually brilliantly programmed. Yes, they will walk into fire and burn to death, or water and drown, but that's because evil minions, by their nature, will throw their lives away if their evil overlord tells them to. to really understand how brilliantly the ai is programmed, take a look at what your minions are wearing after you've been playing for an hour. They'll pick up things that are useful or that they just happen to like and equip them as armor or weapons. At one point I realized several minions had made hats out of the rats they'd defeated earlier, while one was wearing a pot as a helmet and another was wearing a chef's hat. The games humor is what you'd expect, it is very cheesy but can, at times, be pretty funny. The game sound works well, and the voice acting is pretty much on par with Fable. In fact, the game is very, very reminiscent of fable in a lot of ways.

So why did I give the game a 6.5? There are two tragic flaws and one minor annoyance in the game. The first, and the most unforgivable, is that it become pretty boring after just a few hours of play. It basically comes down to entering an area, wandering around until you can't go further, and then sweeping your minions to a point where they can turn a wheel. You can use the minions to destroy a great deal of the environment, but that's only enteretaining for so long before it, too, becomes redundant. Before I get to the second major flaw, the minor annoyance is the quests. They're given to you as many as six at a time...but you have to solve them in a particular order, because you'll need something from the first to fulfill the second. Also, they can be really vague. For example "You'll need to find the red minions, they MUST be around here somewhere." This, after you've already unlocked maybe six or seven LARGE areas in the game. And that's all the direction you get on the quest until you stumble on them in an area that, surprise surprise, you'd never been too and wasn't anywhere near the area you got the quest.

The seond major flaw with the game is...you just aren't evil. For example, you DO fight hobbits in the game...but they are hobbits that have apparently gone mad and are attacking, killing, and enslaving the human population. Some of the horribly evil acts you perform are: freeing enslaved humans, rescuing a damsel in distress, rescuing a villages stolen food supply. Yup...you're as evil as a puppy. And about as powerful as one. When you're wandering around looking for those red minions (for example) it would be really helpful to grab someone and ask if they'd seen them...but you can't initiate a conversation with anyone.

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