Overlord so far has been a game about venturing stereotyped fantasy settings and parodying the more sombre typical orcs and elves fantasy themes, something that has been utilized fairly well by the title so far, and persistently treads its firm and well established ground in the talked about sequel, Overlord II. The games have also done what a lot of others haven’t in the way of perspective, here you play as the bad guy, with an overbearing resemblance to a well known baddie from The Lord of the Rings, you’re able to control a handful of your own minions and wreak havoc to the multi-cultural lands of Overlord.

Overlord is a game that doesn’t take a lot of thinking to understand, and one that you know what to expect of after a brief taster. The fist successor of an unknown amount may share many of Overlord’s well produced characteristics, but does it fit the name of an awaited sequel?

Gameplay:

The basic mechanics of Overlord are simple but creative. Although you’re an overlord, you don’t have much of the spotlight during fights and puzzles that you’ll often stumble across; instead the majority of it is about your minions. From chosen positions on the map you’ll have minion spawns which you’ll summon a select number of companions. Of course there are limitations, you can only have so many – which slowly increases as you advance the plotline – and there’s only one type of minion for the first portion of the game, but it isn’t long until the game leads you to using other types, four to be exact. What makes this unusual feature great is that it adds a slight strategy element to the game, instead of running about hacking and slashing aimlessly and pointlessly, instead you can send out your cannon fodder minions to just overwhelm the enemy. This doesn’t let you just sit back and watch however, you do have the occasional chip-in with a boss fight, and you have some limited spells that provide their uses during set portions.

There’s also a good amount of puzzles in the game that are somewhat patronisingly easy, yet break up the overly simple combat bits that you’ll often take part in. These could be anything from opening a simple gate by placing a few heavy items on a pad to open it, and they’ll often include your minions as well, so in that instance you’d have to send direct your minions to pick up the objects and send them to the pads and set them down, and during this time you’d be attacked by several types of enemies. And its times like these where you know what you have to do; it’s just adapting and testing your creature control to suit the conditions.

Overlord II is exactly this, and it controls pretty much the same too. Left analogue allows you to move your Overlord, ‘A’ to melee attack with your overlord and Right trigger to direct your minions to a pointed area. Now, in theory and on paper it doesn’t sound too bad, in practice however it can be an absolute nightmare to handle. Controlling your overlord is as easy as whacking ‘A’ when you need to, however controlling your minions when you’re doing anything other than just telling them to stand ground can be a frustrating affair indeed. There’s no real priority indicator when attacking a group of different enemies, so if a group of minions are in trouble and they need to take something out quickly you’re are forced to direct them yourself with the right analogue stick. This though is also the camera control for your character’s view, and it’s the enemy pointer, so tapping the right analogue selects an enemy yet holding the right analogue controls the whole group. I think you see how this can be a problem, the minion controls are overly convoluted, and you’ll be trying to avoid having to send your minions anywhere, which is hard when they’re a key intricate to the entire game.

It’s rather hard to define this game’s progression, as it isn’t a free roam adventure title and isn’t completely linear either. It’s contrived to the point where the game leads you to each mission via a fixed route, and that you’ll retrieve your minion types at certain points, but missions become selected as the game goes on, and there are certain side roads that open up allowing you retrieve gold, and resources for weapons and upgrades.

There’s a certain amount of constricted customisation to the game, you’re able to spend money and resources on new armour and weapons as the game goes on, and you may upgrade your home base. A large tower – looking rather like a well known tower from that same film trilogy I mentioned earlier – that is found in a place called the netherworlds, starts off as a giant molten rock giant and slowly carves itself into something a little more civilised. These are nice additions, and give the game some minor RPG qualities, but nothing enough to make a difference to the way it plays or to be able to label it an RPG of any sorts.

Overlord II gameplay wise is essentially a clone of its predecessor, it plays and controls almost exactly the same, there aren’t any major upgrades or additional features, yet it embodies the fun and charm of Overlord following the motto ‘if it isn’t broke why fix it?’ religiously.

Graphics:

Overlord II, and a lot of games that are fantasy and have a comical factor about them, have the Fable condition. It’s exaggerative, bright, and delightful to look at. It hasn’t changed from Overlord, and there’s little sign of improvement except the more varied environments, but that is no complaint, as I cannot imagine Overlord being any other way.

You’ll find yourself in cold and snowy Alaskan themed plains taking on townsfolk, and tropical Amazon inspired jungles hunting down hippy like elves and obese pixie women. Every environment has a clear theme to it, and every environment is different in its own way, yet they’re all well designed and great to look at.

If Overlord is going to be bright and uplifting, it might as well look that way as well.

Sound:

This game is lost without sound; it relies on it more than normal. Not really for its music - which okay and sets the scene - but it’s amusing and ‘out of the blue’ voiceovers. The overlord himself doesn’t talk, as it’s meant to be you, but your minions and the enemy characters throughout the world characterise the stupidity of this game.

The minions tend to trounce around singing war songs or random rhymes when felt appropriate, and just generally like to act stupid and mischievous when not under control of yourself. Whereas the real humour comes from your enemies that form more obvious parodies.

In Overlord II the main enemy you face are the “Glorious Empire” which are a Roman Empire spinoff, yet completely disjointed and outlandish, their leaders are huge and greedy, and the soldiers are just foolish, making some unsurprising connections to Asterix and Obelix comics. You’ll also wander off into some sub feuds with some hippy nature loving elves, which make for some interesting clashes and a number of other familiar fantasy faces.

It isn’t an absolute barrel of laughter, it’s all very light tongue and cheek humour that will have you giggle and a younger one laugh maybe, but it does make a difference to play a game that’s enjoyable and amusing at the same time.

Longevity:

The main storyline is of average length probably taking a regular player 12-14 hours to complete, but with some replayability due to inclusion of character and building upgrades.

Although there’s a lack of real obvious gameplay additions to Overlord II, effort has been made for a co-op and versus components. They’re completely separate from the campaign, and I’m afraid there will be no jump in cooperative during the singleplayer, but you can play some co-op survival, which is fairly self explanatory. Both players are overlords – either online or offline – and you must last against waves of enemies for as long as possible. Then you have co-op invasion, where you buddy up to defeat an enemy leader as fast as possible. You also have a number of versus modes that you battle against one another; one being a dominate map, which is like capturing bases in Call of Duty or Halo, but you take and hold places with the aid of your minions. And then a pillage mode that lets to destroy things to gain gold, and the player that garners enough of it by the end wins the match.

Very simple tag-on modes that won’t last too long, but do add to the replayability somewhat after you’ve finished.

Overall:

Overlord II is a charming little game with its own unique identity, and it can be hell of a lot of fun to play, and for a game that doesn’t really take itself seriously there’s quite a lot of content to play with here. Nice little additions such as upgrading your character, resurrecting minions, and buying items for your mistresses are surprising and are most welcomed. However, when all these features can be found in its predecessor and you find it hard to look for improvements to these elements, you start to question why this game has a number ‘II’ on the end.

Overlord II is a game for those who want to break away from the real world, and instead of playing another seriously dark and violent game, you’ll be able to sit back, relax and mess about and be just joyful with it all. Overlord II is nothing revolutionary to its Overlord counterpart, and it could have easily just been a one off, but in case you missed out, Triumph studios have brought you more of what Overlord does best, just don’t go in expecting anything more.