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Recently I’ve spent alot of my time on a relatively mediocre game called Overlord. While it has many features of what makes a good game, it’s riddled with so many shortcomings that you’ll end up feeling extremely unsatisfied before you reach the end of the game. The guilty pleasure of raiding anything in sight may keep some to the end but it’s largely a forgettable experience.

Overlord sounds like a good game on paper. A third-person RPG / RTS hybrid where you control little gremlin monsters to wreck havoc across the country-side? Who wouldn’t be at least even slightly interested in this concept. Sadly the potential isn’t reached on so many fronts.

The story starts off quite well. You arise from a deep slumber only to find that there seems to be evil in things other than you so you go around to set things right until you encounter a village oppressed by halflings where you’re told to go free some prisoners. That’s when things start to get wrong. An evil overlord going to free oppressed peasants? At least theres the allure of gold being involved. Saving the elven race by killing a berserk elf-tree hybrid? Well he was the supposed saviour of the elves at some point. Stealing back a sacred elf statue for the elves? Now things are really starting to become questionable. There really isn’t a feeling of evil in Overlord apart from the rampart killings you decide to partake in when proceeding from one quest to the other. Even then there’s no feeling of accomplishment when doing an evil deed. Sure you’ll be hated by the peasants if you slaughter a few but that’s about it. The enemies feel a little bit lacking in the good versus evil department as well, pitting you against succubi, zombies, black ninja knight guys, sand worms, beetles of doom, troll, rock golems, undead unicorns and etc. You could just slap on a hero sticker on your character and the story will resemble a generic RPG. Hell there’s even an achievement for having no corruption and being an all-round good guy, in a game which promotes itself by being evil. At least you get evil spikes for being evil though.

The controls don’t lend a helping hand either. For the most part it controls competently but sometimes the game enjoys having random control spasms. For example: To send a minion to attack in the general direction you’re facing you press left-click. To call back a minion you press right-click. To “Sweep” (remotely control your minions) you hold left and right click at the same time. Now this would cause a problem if you want to send and call minions at the same time but generally you don’t do that. The problem is prevalent in that the game constantly gets mixed up on whether the left or right mouse buttons are pressed down sometimes refusing to acknowledge that you’ve let go of the problem. So many times I’ve ended up clicking both buttons like mad just so I can stop sweeping my minions instead of calling them back because I accidently sent them into a death-trap. While this isn’t much of a problem nevertheless it  is extremely frustrating at times. The main problem is how sweeping is used. While “Sweeping” you use your mouse to control your minions, that sounds pretty simple other than the minions don’t stop moving. This is an exercise in frustration until you get used to it during those soup can locks. At least you get a minion respawn nearby incase you fail.

The combat handles pretty well and it’s always enjoyable to see your minions swarm all over a creature and beat it to death but it generally comes down to spam certain minion at enemy. It’s even easier to just go up to the enemy and beat him to death with your own sword and you get it done faster that way too. It’s hard to feel that the whole minion thing isn’t just a gimmick. While they do have their uses at certain places and offer that little touch, they’re easily replaced by other game mechanics. Most of the time the minions feel much too fragile to be of any use but at least they serve as decent temporary meatshields (until they die.)

What this game does right is it’s style and that’s evident from the voice clips of the minions as they rape and pillage houses and mount sheep like a rodeo. Most of the game is played for laughs which isn’t a bad thing as it’s quite easy to just pass time running around destroying everything in sight. Unfortunately this gets old after a very short time as there isn’t much variation on what you’re able to do. To pillage an area it generally comes down to: look at area, send minions to attack. Replace minions with yourself if they’re all dead.

While the game is fun, it’s largely forgettable. There isn’t much reason to play this other than it somehow managed to land in your hard-drive after International Pirate Day. You’ll be more evil by stealing this game than anything within the game. At least it’s better than Oblivion though. While the ambition and potential are there, sadly it hasn’t be reached which is a shame because if it got past the really buggy control schemes and was a little bit more evil it might’ve been a great game. Sadly it’ll have to settle for good at the time of playing.