Be evil!
Overlord is the first in a pretty decent series of third person action adventures that let you play the bad guy and which provide plenty of skull cracking fun. This game combines bits of Dungeon Master with Pikmin to largely decent effect, although it never quite reaches its potential. The story, told with some humor, tells how your minion master has got himself killed and allowed your tower to get wrecked. Now, as the titular Overlord, it's fallen to you to sort out this mess and get things back in order. To repair the tower and take out the heroes, you have to summon minions to fight for you and do the menial work. At first, you can only summon some fairly useless ones with limited abilities but as you level up, better ones come your way and which will allow you to destroy your enemies with greater ease. They can also grab useful items and make use of them on the battlefield. As an Overlord, you have access to spells too, with more opening up, along with new rooms like forges and armories, when you complete quests. Overlord is definitely a quirky game which has a lot of original concepts and which is executed well. The world is well created and believable, partially thanks to the lovely, detailed visuals which pack a lot of punch. The gameplay gets quite complex but is never frustrating thanks to an intuitive control system which mostly makes managing your minions a breeze, although there are issues when controlling small groups. The game also starts out a bit of a chore, while the puzzles aren't overly challenging. If you can get past this though, there's a lot to enjoy here.
