Toppling empires, enslaving villagers, clubbing seals, it's all in a days work for the Overlord

I played the original Overlord from start to finish and enjoyed it a whole bunch. The game cast you in the role of the evil fantasy world antagonist, out to make life hard for the poor rural locals and cause lots of collateral damage with your horde of gremlin like minions. With its unusual gameplay (to everyone who never played Pikimin) and original concept it garnered some pretty positive reviews and became one of those great games no one played. With the sequel I was hoping they’d clean up the games issues and really deliver an amusing an fun alternative to all the wholesome adventuring in other fantasy games. Well, they didn’t actually address any of the problems with Overlord 2, but they did stick in a bunch of new stuff which is kind of the same thing… right?

Overlord 2 starts of with you as the Overlad, young progeny of the previous games Overlord, smuggled away from his dark tower and raised in the local peasant village with your history unknown to all, even yourself. The local children have noticed you’re a little different though, what with the blue skin and glowing eyes, and treated you with the according child like response, bullying and tormenting. Unfortunately for them the minions, your short, highly aggressive goblin servants have found you and are ready to do your bidding; which is initially to mess things up for all the people who’ve treated you badly. Just as your little ones are tearing apart the holiday festival troops from the Empire show up, looking for anyone with magical powers. The townspeople quickly throw you to the Empire’s forces but your minions are quick to protect their new Overlord. The story line jumps to you as a fully grown and heavily armoured adult ready to take a horrible vengeance against the Empire and conquer the lands. The fact the usual band of fantasy characters have been abandoned in favour of the new threat from the Roman like Empire is one the games major departures from the original game.

Your minions definitely have a quantity over quality attitude to warfare

Being evil is fun and Overlord 2 exploits are instinctive knowledge of this simple fact. There’s a reason the evil laugh cackled by mad scientists and megalomaniacs while the goodies look on stoically, or that evil guys seem to get all the chicks you'd rather date while the goodies seem to get the girls that are polite, evil is fun. In Overlord 2 you’ll certainly get to expand your evil muscle, spending most of your time crushing and destroying relatively innocent people, looting their homes and trying to decide whether or not you’re going to use a spell to mentally force them to be your drooling slaves or cut them down with your axe. Best of all you even get a series of comely wenches to hang around your chambers looking sexy while you’re off fulfilling male power fantasies of destruction and domination. Lets not even go into the Freudian implications of your base of operations being a huge tower.

Despite having a few spells and a range of medieval weapons your main weapon will always be your minions. Coming in four flavours the Browns are your stock soldier types, the Reds are your fire proof long range attackers, the Greens are your poison proof stealth units and the Blues are your water proof healing units that resurrect other dead minions. If you have several types in your current horde at once you can select specific types to perform specific actions, set up waypoints to group minions and so on.

That's it lands, keep running into her mouth untill the indigestions too much for her

The Browns will usually make up the core of your troops with the other three supporting them. Initially you’ll only have the Browns and unlock the others during your adventures. This has the negative affect of you often over relying on the standard Brown attack method of ‘pull the trigger and send them all charging in’ and you’ll probably lose quite a few of your weaker minions before you learn to be more strategic. Initially you’ll only have fifteen minions in your horde but by games end you’ll have a fearsome army of the little buggers at your heels. The right stick isn’t a ‘look stick’ which can take some getting used too, it’s actually used to manually move your horde around which is sometimes required to get to otherwise inaccessible areas or enemies. The controls are sometimes a bit sticky and it takes practise to sweep your little guys exactly where you want them to go.

There are a few features of Overlord, issues carried over form the original game, that will annoy some gamers before they can be charmed by the comedy fantasy setting. The first and most troublesome of these is that you are a pussy. You might think that because you dress like Sauron and have glowing eyes you’ll be able to knock the stuffing out of enemies or zap them into smears of jam with your powers. Much like Sauron treating the alliance of elves and men like piñatas at the start of Lord of the Rings. Sadly no, you need the minions to fight for you because without them you’ll be quickly beaten to a pulp by the next reasonable group of enemies you encounter. You’re supposed to be an Overlord, but without your minions you don’t feel like it. Second is your characters slow movement speed, it takes forever to traipse around levels, especially as you have to revisit many zones more than once and the between level jaunts around your magical tower quickly devolve from 'oh ah' moments of being impressed to frustration at the fact it takes ten minutes for you to just walk to the upgrade room. Third is the fact that although your tower is very impressive and cool, most of the upgrades and the things you buy for your mistresses don’t do anything. In fact there’s no impetus to spend any money on your mistresses at all. Don’t expect any Overlord 2 ‘let me polish your lance my lord’ mini game. You spend all your money on these girls with no reward, that’s not an Overlord’s harem, that’s a marriage, trust me I have the RL experience to recognise the scenario, my husband skills are grinded to max.

It's bring your wolf riding minion army to work day, tomorrow, pancake breakfast

The game does have some new features for fans of the last one, naval battles add a novel diversion from the general level structure, as do the ability to jump into a minions body and sneak up on enemies from behind. You also now have the ability to resurrect one of your favourite minions by sacrificing a bunch of lower levels ones, but given that the majority of them all look the same there really isn’t much reason to do this. Rather than having the choice of good or evil you now have the choice of evil or US conservative republican evil which often is the choice too enslave a town to be your slaves or slaughter its citizens, burn down their buildings, use their toilets without flushing and drink all their beer. There is a multiplayer mode but its not likely to set the world on fire. I played on the PS3 and games where hard to come by. There's a competitive mode that has you either capturing territory or treasure with your hordes before the other players do but the cooperative modes are much more fun where you and a fellow Overlord either have to defend against a never ending army of attackers in a Survival mode or team up against a bunch tough enemies in Invasion mode. It's a fun diversion when the single player gets a bit stale but overall, much like the original Overlord multiplayer, it can be pretty laggy and hard to find people to play with.

Overlord 2 is a fun game, it’s a lot of fun using your minions to do all your dirty work and searching the various zones for upgrades and items to take back to your dark tower, oh and having an upgradeable dark tower is sweet. In fact all games should have a dark tower base for your character. The game just feels too light on, as if it should have a lot more depth to its various elements but instead decided to add a bunch more shallow elements to the gameplay for a sequel. If you’re looking for something a bit different, a game that plays the humour card or you just flat out like being bad, Overlord 2 should float your boat for a dozen hours.