Overlord and Overlord: Raising Hell

So thanks again to Steam and it's wonderful ability to offer me games at 75% off I purchased Overlord and its expansion, Raising Hell.

For those of you not familiar with the Overlord series, it's can be basically described as "Evil Pikmin," the pretty darn good Nintendo game based around Captain Olimar and his leafy friends.

You play The Overlord, a nameless, voiceless Sauron-clone whom has just returned to his Dark Tower to find it destroyed by "heroes" and spend the game regaining your status as Dark Ruler of Everywhere. The tower serves as your base of operations and has 5 different sections. The throne room houses your throne, obviously, as well as the portal you use to travel to difference levels of the game. As you collect gold during your travels you can use it to upgrade and beautify your tower, inside and out, as soon as you've "acquired" a Mistress. There are two options, basically chase'n'pure or naughty'n'dark, both of which give different styles of decor. (N.B. i went with Velvet, the evil Mistress, and once I'd bought all the upgrades there was a humerus sex scene. Nice) The Mistress lives in the top floor of the Tower, occupying one of the 5 'rooms' previously mentioned.

The dungeon is basically an arena in which you can practise fighting against any enemy that you've previously defeated, and is quite useful in figuring out how the hell you kill Rock Giants with tiny, fleshy goblins. The underground chamber houses the Tower Heart, which you use to power the portal, and locations to store Hives. Each Hive allows you to command a different colour Minion and are scattered through the games various levels.

The Forge allows you to equip The Overlord with various armours and weapons, once you've found the relevant Forge from the game world. There are 3 levels of armour, and they are purely aesthetic until you begin upgrading them. By sacrificing minions. This is a bit of a fail, as I pretty much never found anywhere near enough minions to make this worthwhile. I managed to get arcane armour with a +5% health regeneration ability, by sacrificing about 200 Green Minions - they're just not plentiful enough for this to be viable. The weapons available are basic, to say the least, but can be upgraded again by sacrificing Minions. With the addition of the Raising Hell expansion several unique items become available, but again they require far too many Minions to be attainable without farming for hours, so i never bothered.

So that's the Tower, from which you access the various worlds available for conquest. I very much enjoyed this game, because it had such a limited moral 'Molyneux' compass, but one that was still relevant. Its a percentage of evil, evil acts increase it, good acts don't decrease it. I ended the game at 50%. The aforementioned Evil Acts are simple, but well placed. For example, the elves - once hated enemies of the Minions - are now slaves to the dwarves, and as The Overlord who eventually defeats one of the Dwarven Kings, you can choose to save the elven women and allow the race to continue, or take the large pile of shiny gold. Simple, and yet just enough to make you stop and consider which choice -you- would make, as opposed to which choice is obviously better for advancing through the game. Its essentially a balance between killing worshipers to keep the rest in line, or saving all of them so you have more to rule over.

The Minions. There are 4 types of Minion; Brown, Red, Green and Blue, each suited to different tasks and situations, each badly suited to various roles. Browns are your fighters, tough and strong, able to take on everything when in large enough numbers, and will always be the most numerous under your command. Reds are ranged units, incredibly weak in direct combat, but deadly in numbers. They are also the only units able to put out fires and traverse lava and other such toasty places. Greens very much look the best, equipped with Vega style claws and jungle attire, and are mediocre fighters. They're the only units able to remove poisonous plants, in a similar way to how the Reds deal with fires. Once stationed at a rally point they will quickly become invisible to enemies, and should one approach they will leap onto it and cause heavy damage before leaping back to the point to re-cloak. Blues are bastards. They possess so many useful attributes, are piss-weak, rare, and the last Minion Hive to be found. Because of this it requires some back-tracking of the earlier levels, something which i despise about games (See: every Halo game ever). Blues are aquatic, immune to magic, the only thing that can kill magic enemies, and act as Minion medics. Direct combat? Not a chance, as you'd expect from a healer unit. Because of their aquatic nature they are invaluable in many situations, usually involving retrieving Objects. By the end of my play through i could control 30 Minions (Game max being 50), usually made of 18 Browns, 4 Blues and 8 Reds, and I was pretty much unstoppable. That is, until the game throws a curve ball. Insta-kills.

This is my only problem with this game. 80% of all enemies can be swarmed with Browns and cut down, or picked off by Reds from afar, but as you'd expect there are certain enemies only vulnerable to a certain Minion - this is expected and not a criticism in for game like this. However, during the later stages of the game, certain enemies are introduced with the ability to kill large numbers of your Minions to death and then they die from it. Beyond the healing abilities of the Blues.
"But you can just summon more Minions!" I hear you cry, this is true, but due to the nature of the Minion's combat effectiveness, a great irritation. You're constantly informed of your Combat Effectiveness Percentage, based on what weapons and armour your Minions can scavenge from defeated enemies, crates etc. So losing all of your Browns, fully upgraded with the armour of fallen enemies, (I've had Minions wearing Dwarven beards, Rat faces, Skulls, Greek Theatrical Masks and even Bonnets) can drop your combat effectiveness from 400% down to about 150%, it irritated me beyond belief, and becomes more and more common as you near the end of the game. Its a tactic that attempts to negate your previous attained upgrades to level the playing field in a very cheap way. For example, the final boss changes colour depending on which Minion can damage him, a good mechanic. But in between quick trips to the B&Q paint aisle, he enjoys Taz the Tazmanian Devil'ing his way around the area, insta-killing everything. Cheap. Cheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeap i say!

Overall, the level design is solid, if a tad repetitive, which makes it easy to fall into a good pattern of success but without becoming monotonous. I will say the epic distances between Autosave points is ridiculous, especially later in the game when insta-killing really makes me want to just reload the checkpoint so I'd have my best Minions back from the dead. The pathfinding abilities of Minions is appalling, they handle like American Muscle cars - its either straight ahead, or get stuck on every slight bend between you and them. Surprisingly the storyline is actually tangible, and even has a twist which I honestly didn't see coming! I'm soon to play Overlord 2, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing if the same story is continued.

In summery, a solid game with a good smattering of humour, a blatantly copied concept but executed well to give an enjoyable game. Definitely worth the £1.40 I paid for it.