It all boils down to how wicked and screwed up you are (after playing this game I’ve discovered that I am indeed a greatly disturbed person). One example of this morality in action is when you are given the chance to either enslave a town and its citizens or kill them all and burn the village to the ground. Overlord II has the morality, but it’s done differently in this game you have to be a bad guy, that’s just who you are, so instead of choosing between good and evil you are given the choice of being evil, or very evil. But, like a radioactive puppy, the novelty wears off pretty quickly and you just become sick of it.Video games have been trying to figure out morality for a very long time, but few have been successful in their attempts. There is a lot going for it: the mere concept is still enough to make it stand out from the hordes of other RTS/RPGs, and it certainly has its charms. The sheer levels of charisma contained in Overlord II make it immensely hard to dislike, but I think I’ve just about managed it. It’s not a bad thing just a little quaint in these days of games being proper grown-up entertainment. In fact, take away the contemporary graphics and the whole game feels like a product of about 15 years ago, when cute little bastards with funny voices (Lemmings, Worms) in genre-mashing settings could shift oversized boxes of games.
I thought that flaws like these had gone the way of the dinosaur, when the last generation of consoles became extinct but, obviously not. The Al is also abysmal, with bad guys standing there while your scamps kick seven shades of shinola out of them, or becoming horrendously aggressive and beating your mites into minion jam.
I could just about put up with the irregular save points, and the lack of a quicksave system but enemies re-spawning upon loading made me want to kick my PC across the room. It’s so much of a console conversion that it might as well have come on a cartridge. My frustrations with the game didn’t end there. It was only after about thirty minutes that I accidentally walked in the wrong direction and realized that, just this once, the player character wasn’t as hydrophobic as a cat made of granulated coffee. I spent ages stood in a seemingly-unescapable room, my exit blocked by a small stream. The levels are neatly constructed around your save points – I mean, portals – but figuring out what you’ve got to do is a process of trial and error. Unfortunately, even the cutest of minions can’t cover the fact that the game has more flaws than a carpet skyscraper. The first level is littered with snowmen, and ordering your minions to attack results in them stealing the snowmen’s heads and wearing them as freakish snow helmets. Sitting somewhere between the Gremlins and Gollum on the small fantasy creatures scale, they’re utterly hilarious and absolutely captivating, causing untold chaos wherever they go. If the titular character lacks presence, the minions steal the show, and there’s nothing quite like executing a perfect attack using the variety of little buggers on offer. The hands-off approach takes a little getting used to, and if you prefer your hacking and slashing to be a bit more tactile it may leave you cold. The control system – as with the first – is incredibly intuitive: left button to attack, right button to defend, both buttons to go-on-a-mad-rampage-and-destroy-everything-in-sight. Of course, essentially you’re also a bad guy but you’re one of those good bad guys, like Darth Vader or his Sith master, Michael Barrymore.Īs well as conquering the land, you have to keep your hellish base up and running, and make sure you’ve always got enough minions. The setting seems to be that period of time when the Roman Empire invaded the Christmas display of an undernourished shopping centre, and it’s up to you to fight off the endless hordes of bad guys. In spite of some graphical improvements, the control system and central idea remain the same.
Yes, this is Overlord II, the sequel to 2007’s RTS-cum-adventure, which placed you in the role of a mute demonic character and lets you oversee his ongoing sinister shenanigans. He also has the tastiest armor, a nice line in monstrous helmets, the smoothest custard, and – naturally – an army of minions to carry out his evil deeds.
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