I Guess I Just Care Too Much To Be An Evil Overlord

Early last week I picked up the game Overlord. I was becoming concerned that the consistent playing of Guitar Hero was going to ruing my wrists. I decided to pick up game played with your standard controller, so I could return to ruining my thumbs.

In Overlord you are a well...um...an Overlord. You have been brought to back to life by your minions. Your job is to eliminate the lords that have taken over your land. You do this with minions of course. The game is basically Pikmin except rather then direct little creatures to harvest and such you use minions to fight, gather, and even sacrifice for you. Basically they are willing and supposed to die for you. The problem is I become attached to some of them. There are red, green, blue and brown minions at your disposal. Red throw fire balls. Green are immune to poison and have slight stealth abilities. The blue heal and won't drown in water. The brown minions are your grunts that handle most of the man to man combat. The red, green, and blues I don't really care about. It's the brown minions that I've become attached to. They are the ones that have the personality. They have the habit of picking up anything they can get their hands on and wear it everything from a chef's hat, to a DoDo bird's head. So when my minion wearing the DoDo bird's head or the one wearing the red scarf die I feel a slight twinge of loss. The longer they survive the more attached I become to them. So much so that when they die I will go back to my last save point to try to get them through it alive. I even end up doing a lot of the flying so they won't die. What kind of Overlord is that? Aren't I supposed to be a heartless and cruel ruler? If one dies, I can easily summon two or three to replace it. Yet, I love those little bastards.

The game on whole is fun. Sending your little minions wiping out the country side can be a lot of fun. There is nice sense of dark humor to the game. It moves smoothly even with twenty-five minions running all over the place. Because you control your minions with the right joystick that leaves only the left joy stick to move the Overlord. That means the camera can get a little wonky sometimes leaving you looking in the wrong direction and easily flanked. Also, during the big battles it can get pretty chaotic directing your minions to where they need to go. Your minions can get stuck sometimes. Even with all those problems the game is still a fun diversion, and a nice change of pace.