Continuing with the self-appointed "Game Week", a few thoughts on Overlord (Xbox 360 version). The long and the short of it: I think it's a great game and enjoyed it quite a bit. Download the demo yourself on Xbox Live or for the PC at Fileplanet or other places.

I just the other day finished playing through it once, doing my best to pursue the more evil choices in the game. I won't lie, I saw 4:00am more than once while playing it. It has that "Just a few more minutes" quality, like an RPG or turn-based strategy game. What can I say, being an Overlord is a demanding job.

What I Liked

The gameplay is fun and different. Your minions are really the focus of your interaction with the world, with your character serving more as an avatar and rallying point, particularly early in the game.

The writing is amusing and enjoyable--the game has a sense of humor.

The voices are generally well done, particularly that of Gnarl your "tutor" who leads you in the right direction and chimes in with his snide comments from time to time. The minions are all very amusing with regards to the idle sounds they make and their excited cheers when they come across treasure or new weapons to pick up. Each of the four minion types sound distinct as well, from the wheezing of the reds to the burbling of the blues, giving them some extra character.

The animations of the minions are fun as well, adding a little more life and character. They don't just attack their enemies, they swarm on them and jump on their backs or, in the case of sheep, ride them around like a bronco. They also proudly hold up new weapons and armor when acquire them, and carry you treasure in an almost innocent way, like a child with a present for daddy.

You can never fail at a task or be forced to start all over again. Your own death simply leads to you being taken back to your tower, and the death of your minions, although sometimes sad, isn't too much of an impediment. Usually you just summon more, or if there are none left, go out and kill some creatures to gain the "lifeforce" needed to summon minions. Dying or losing your minions isn't exactly desirable, but it's nice that it doesn't get too much in the way of your fun or your experimenting (like seeing what happens when you swarm your brown minions into a lake--turns out they drown).

The fact that minions can pick up weapons, armor, hats, etc. that they find is great, allowing your minions to grow stronger the more you take them with you. The browns, your basic fighter minions, actually don the weapons and armor individually, often giving your band a rag-tag appearance with each of them possibly carrying something slightly different. As Gnarl points out, they sometimes pick up not-so-useful items, which adds to the amusement.

What I Didn't Like

The control scheme takes a little getting used to, since the right stick is used to move your minions around instead of camera controls like other games (though, in a smart move on the developers part, you can hold the left bumper to make the right stick act as camera control).

Sweeping of minions is a great mechanic, and fun, but because of your camera angle you sometimes can't move them very far before it becomes difficult to tell what they are doing. It is sometime tough to sweep them where you want them to go (inside some doors or over some obstacles) and because your minions don't always stay together you can have control issues where it is difficult to get them all to move to the same place.

The targeting system, which serves as a way of highlighting objects/enemies for interacting by both you and your minions, is clunky and awkward. It's not a huge impediment as you usually just sweep your minions where you want them to go, but sometimes you want to only send one or two and it can be frustrating trying to select a target.

There are some pathfinding issues with your minions when you send them off to do their own thing, which means you often have to babysit them when they are transporting large artifacts back to a teleporter to your tower, otherwise they won't be able to find their way back to you. This can get rather boring. Also, it is often difficult to get them to pick up items that have been dropped by dead enemies or found by destroying chests. If they are near an object they usually pick it up right away, but sometimes you'll have to run your whole mob over it ten times before someone bothers to grab it. This happens most with armor/weapons because only minions that want it (i.e. have crappier equipment) will pick them up, and so you have to move your swarm such that those particular minions are moving over the right spot.

Occasionally your minions do very stupid things that can cause them to die or kill their comrades. For instance, most of your minions can't cross water, but you can. In one level I found myself on the other side of a body of water and the game decided to kill all of my minions instead of just leaving them on the bank like it was supposed to. In other cases, your red minions (which throw tiny fireballs) can set fire to the grass or explosive objects if they are standing too close when they decide to attack, killing everyone nearby.

Also, although I liked the idea of forging weapons and armor and sacrificing minions to add power to them, it doesn't have a huge effect on gameplay, especially later in the game. Since the focus is on the minions, it would have been better perhaps if you could have forged them tiny sets of armor or something else related to them. The ability to buy decorations and cosmetic enhancement to your dark tower is a nice idea, but the exterior touches didn't seem very noticeable, and you don't spend a great deal in and about your tower to appreciate it. Additionally, gold is so plentiful during your pillaging that you seem to be able to buy all of it at once, making it feel like you don't have to work much to acquire these aesthetic improvements.

A minimap would have been nice (the environments aren't huge, but it can get confusing at times) and there were some bugs here and there that should have been caught in testing.

The Bottom Line

Overlord is a fun and different game and I enjoyed it thoroughly. My complaints with the game are relatively minor, none of them being game-breakers or so terribly frustrating as to make me want to stop. I found it very hard to turn off once I was playing and recommend the title.