The devil has the best melodies, they say. He also has the tastiest armor, a nice line of monstrous helmets, the softest custards, and naturally an army of minions to carry out his evil deeds. Yes, this is Overlord II, the sequel to 2007’s RTS-cum-adventure, which casts you into the role of a mute demonic character and allows you to oversee his sinister ongoing antics.
Despite some graphical improvements, the control system and the central idea remain the same. The setting seems to be that period of time when the Roman Empire invaded a malnourished mall’s Christmas display, and it’s up to you to fight the endless hordes of baddies. Of course, you’re essentially a bad boy too; but you’re one of those good bad guys, like Darth Vader or his Sith master, Michael Barrymore.
In addition to conquering the land, you must keep your infernal base running and make sure you always have enough minions. The control system, like the first one, is incredibly intuitive: left button to attack, right button to defend, both buttons to attack and destroy everything in sight. The hands-off approach takes a bit of getting used to, and if you’d prefer your hacking and cutting to be a bit more tactile, you can leave it cool.
If the main character lacks a presence, the minions steal the show, and there’s nothing like executing a perfect attack using the variety of little critters on offer. Sitting somewhere between the Gremlins and Gollum on the scale of fantasy little creatures, they are absolutely hilarious and absolutely captivating, causing untold chaos wherever they go.
The first level is littered with snowmen, and if you order your minions to attack, they will steal the heads of the snowmen and use them as snow helmets. Unfortunately, even the cutest of minions can’t cover the fact that the game has more flaws than a carpet skyscraper. The levels are carefully constructed around your save points, I mean portals, but figuring out what you have to do is a process of trial and error. Especially the last one. I spent centuries in a seemingly inescapable room, my exit blocked by a small stream. It was only after about thirty minutes that I accidentally walked in the wrong direction and realized that, just this once, the player character was not as hydrophobic as a cat made from coffee grains.
My frustrations with the game did not end there. It’s so much a console conversion that it might as well have come in a cartridge. It could put up with irregular save points and the lack of a quick save system; but the reappearing enemies when charging made me want to kick my PC across the room. The AI is abysmal too, with the bad guys standing there as your scoundrels kick seven shades of shinola, or get terribly aggressive and beat your mites into minions.
I thought flaws like these had gone out of the way of the dinosaur, when the last generation of consoles died out, but obviously not.
In fact, if you remove the contemporary graphics, the whole game feels like a product from some 15 years ago, when adorable bastards with funny voices (Lemmings, Worms) in genre-mix settings could switch oversized game boxes. . Not a bad thing just a little quaint these days when games are adult entertainment.
The high levels of charisma contained in Overlord II make it immensely difficult not to like it, but I think I have almost succeeded. There’s a lot going for it – the sheer concept is still enough to stand out from the hordes of other RTS / RPGs, and it certainly has its charms. But, like a radioactive puppy, the novelty wears off pretty quickly and you just get tired.
