Picking Up Steam: Overlord (PC)
The difference between a hero and a villain is more than just a point of view. While the hero will charge bravely into battle themselves, a villain often prefers to let their underlings do his dirty work. While the villain protagonist you play as in Overlord will certainly bloody his blade at times, his command over a small army of minions is how he truly achieves his goals of conquest.
Overlord takes place after a band of seven heroes had taken out the previous evil lord, his impish advisor Gnarl appointing you the successor to don the dark armor. However, with the Dark Tower in shambles and many of your resources plundered, you aren’t quite on the level of your predecessor to start, the player needing to set out into the fantasy world to build up your strength. However, those same seven heroes have not been idle since the defeat of the previous overlord. Rather than ushering in an era of peace, the former heroes have given into their vices, the halfling Melvin Underbelly for example quite larger thanks to his constant pigging out while the paladin now fails to protect his people from a zombie outbreak as he prefers to chase his lustful urges in secret. The new leadership of the land isn’t exactly better than being ruled over by a villain, so when you show up and find places in disarray, the civilians care less that you’re a villain and more if you can get a job done.
This does mean, on some level, you’re not quite acting like a villain some of the time, overthrowing the now corrupted heroes likely a net positive, but you are given moments where you can decide how dastardly you want to be. You might be asked to collect some of the townsfolk’s pilfered food stores and get the option to keep it for yourself or get the chance to torch the sacred grove of the elves to avoid having to fight the slavering unicorns within, but even when there are choices that feel like you’re choosing between being good or bad, the game tries to spin it more like choosing to either be an overlord who rules through terror or one who protects the peasants so they’ll grovel at his feet. The specific alignment you go with won’t drastically alter the story, a few extra events arising here or there, but some elements like choosing your mistress will change whether you have the cruel and flirtatious Velvet whispering in your ear from time to time or the more composed and intelligently evil Rose offering her wisdom. Specific resources can be gained based on such choices too, as one might expect if they decide to abandon the Elven race to their doom to grab a big haul of gold instead that you can use to buy decorations for your tower or acquire light upgrades to your armor.
As part of your journey to gain power and influence, you will find yourself primarily relying on the gaunt goblin creatures referred to as your Minions. Minions are fairly easy to command, either by locking onto a point of interest and sending them charging in to do whatever interaction is required or guiding them together in one large group that you can move about the nearby area freely. For the most part, the main activities Minions are responsible for will be things like carrying useful objects around, activating mechanisms, or attacking enemies, the player mostly just needing the right number of imps on hand for the less violent tasks while fights will be a matter of commanding them well to avoid losses. Minions mostly throw themselves onto a foe and attack until they’re done, killed, or shaken off, and with many an opponent, calling back your minions at the right time is key to avoiding unnecessary losses. As befitting an evil overlord, some sacrifices will be necessary along the way and you shouldn’t get too worked up if swathes of the little imps get killed by a powerful attack, but you do need to build up their numbers from time to time by hunting down simple creatures like sheep and beetles that have energy orbs inside them. Play too sloppily and recovery can be a bit of a task, but this means that you do at least treat the general army with some care, the player needing to properly guide them during certain fights rather than rushing down everything you meet.
Over the course of the adventure you will get different minion types that have their own unique abilities and functions, and if the comparisons to Pikmin’s minion management weren’t clear before, the fact the game has red imps that can safely traverse fire and blue ones that are the only ones that can pass through water safely show where Overlord’s inspirations lie. Between the brown, green, red, and blue variants though, there are a few more functions that make them more unique than what doesn’t hurt them. A green Minion for example has a special backstab attack, making them a great special unit to use in a fight for heavy damage should you be able to wind them around a monster’s back. You can bring a mix of imps with you to battle and swap which specific set of them you’re commanding at the time to pull off cleaner commands of that nature, but there will be a little awkwardness still because of things like the blue Minions in particular being very weak in combat or the red ones choosing to attack from afar with fireballs. Each type has its purpose and some puzzles that make use of their unique powers, but sometimes the differentiation can be a bit of millstone around your neck. Coming to the end of a long stretch and finding you don’t have enough of the right color minion to perform a task involves a long tromp back to spawners, and while keeping a mix on hand is wise, you can’t exactly account for unknown dangers ahead and until you’ve gotten a fair few upgrades, you can only have a small bunch of minions with you at a time anyway.
Despite the occasional roadblock that takes a little wind from your sails though, Overlord does make your work feel fairly productive rather often. Along the way there are destructible objects that earn you resources or give your troops chances to find weaponry and armor so they’re a bit better in a fight, there are more meaningful finds along the way to grab with your minions to earn upgrades to your health, and you can even start finding magic spells that let you influence the battles more. A fire blast, the power to slow foes, and buffs for your own troops can get stronger and stronger if you scour the areas you explore for the upgrades to deliver back to the tower, and heading through areas like a darkly twisted enchanted forest or a dwarven mine more focused on beer production than mining give you spaces with special puzzle interactions on top of new foes and a change in scenery.
The quest to become a powerful villain is definitely portrayed with more humor than sincerity, the fantasy world not in a dire state but portrayed as a pretty run-down place to live. The irreverent tone suits that freedom to indulge in some villainous chaos from time to time without major consequences, and seeing how a typically heroic archetype has been twisted is another reason to keep pressing on into the adventure. Some steam is lost a bit in the desert area right before a strong finale that is an excellent pay off to everything you’ve learned along the way in terms of your minions abilities and how to manage them under duress, but the supplemental multiplayer mode is rather plain. Playable still in split screen even with the online options long dead, the multiplayer’s three modes shift how you’ll handle the action. Pillage is the closest in capturing the main adventure’s flow, the player needing to build up their army gradually and acquire resources, conflict with the other overlord possible but not necessary for victory in the race to become the more powerful player. Slaughter pits the two players against each other though while Survival instead makes it a cooperative effort to fend of enemies. Pillage perhaps does a better job of including the task management and measuring of stakes that make the adventure effective, but there is some thrill in just letting your minions run loose in the less tactical modes too, these modes a bit simple overall to the point they are not a draw but can at least be worth dabbling in if you’re curious.
THE VERDICT: Overlord is more of a villainous romp than an actual host to an evil adventure, but the humorous presentation makes it easy to delight in being bad when you do indulge. The minion commanding is an effective way to guide the action, your little army’s different colored imps allowing for some interesting puzzles and exploration between siccing them on whatever monsters stand in your path. The multiplayer is a little tacked-on and sometimes your minions have downsides that slow things down rather than make for interesting decision making, but their more unique characteristics mean you are given additional ways to approach a battle just in the same way you can sometimes pick whether you want the peasants of the land to worship you or fear your might.
And so, I give Overlord for PC…
A GOOD rating. Overlord is a bit of a parody of the hero who sets a world gone wrong right, your villainous quest for power also happening to clear out the other problems in the world making for an adventure with creative twists to well-worn fantasy concepts while providing some light laughs along the way. Your adventuring may sometimes hit a snag when the limits on your minion management arise, some moments leaning too much into having the right units for the job as a barrier, but being able to set things up like red minions who can pester helpless foes from on high or getting some strong backstabs on the really tough foes with green minions make up for the stumbles with moments you feel like you pulled off a good strategy. Some fights will just be about hurling your troops at the monsters ahead and waiting, some puzzles are just about moving the imps into position to grab what’s needed, but there are enough moments that step up how much thought and management are needed to do things well without unnecessary losses to ensure the minion focus was the wise decision. Letting you run in and slash things up or cast a spell helps alleviate some of the moments where it could have been a bit too passive as well, and littering the world with helpful finds also helps the game stretch its legs a bit in terms of what it asks you to do. The blue troops do feel like they were made a bit too weak, especially since its main purpose seems to be to facilitate luring some evil dodos away from their nests with eggs while other minions grab the goodies they guard in a way that doesn’t always function properly unfortunately. Those dodos, known as Boombos, will likely make you groan as they reappear, especially since they’ll be surrounded by water to force the blue minion use, but most other actions better facilitate problem solving and whatever losses might be incurred by a slip-up during them feel more like the results of your actions. Some rebalancing and some more elaboration on how the different colored servants can be made to function would help to push the envelope a bit more, but Overlord works well as a more irreverent and violent twist on the minion management format it takes from Pikmin.
When I first played Overlord, its villainous inversions of heroism stuck with me even though I didn’t get too far into it, but I know exactly why I dropped it when I did. Put simply, the new minion types required additional inputs to properly manage, and back with just the keyboard and trackpad, it didn’t seem like it was going to work well. Telling myself I’d wait until I had a mouse with a proper mouse wheel or a PC compatible controller to resume my adventure, that did end up proving true, albeit many years later than expected. Still, revisiting the world of Overlord provided many more memorable elements and an effective evil adventure, even if the game doesn’t want you to go down too dark a road with your villainous acts.