Overlord 2 [PC, PS3, Xbox 360]

Posted July 5, 2009 by Charles McManamy in Featured, Featured Home, PC, PS3, Reviews, Xbox 360.

Reviewed on the Xbox 360

The first Overlord game released in 2007 was an enjoyable action RPG, that placed you in the role of what would normally be the final villain of a game.  Befitting your role as a master of evil, you did not have to do the fighting yourself, but instead had your not so trusty minions to help terrorise the peasants and kill the cute fluffy animals.

Move forward 2 years and its sequel offers more of the same, with you being placed in the role of a new Overlord who is the son of the Overlord from the original game who has been MIA since the end of the Raising Hell expansion. As in the first game, you set out under Gnarls guidance to battle the forces of “good” and restore evil to its rightful place. Though it has to be noted that as in the first game, a lot of the forces of good seem just as evil, if not more so than you are.

The gameplay in Overlord 2 is largely unchanged from the first game with a few minor tweaks. You still take control of the Overlord and then go around causing mayhem and destruction in the world. While you can try to take enemies on by yourself this is a recipe for a quick death, and so you can order your minions into the fray, with some enemies best suited to being killed by certain types of minion.

The minions are still a key part of Overlord, and in addition to battling enemies are used to access inaccessible areas to either open them up for the Overlord, or to obtain otherwise unattainable treasures. As in the first game there are four types of minion, the Browns, Reds, Greens and Blues who all have their own strengths and weaknesses. The minions at some points in the game can put on disguises, and this is used to inject humour into the game with them occasionally bursting into an appropriate song, with my main regret being there was not enough of this.

One of the new features in Overlord 2 is that all but the Blue minions can now ride animals, with the Browns, Greens and Reds riding Wolves, Spiders and Salamanders respectively. You can also resurrect recently killed minions which means that well equipped minions can now be rescued if killed, at the expense of some lesser minions of the same type. Unfortunately, these are the only new innovations for the minions, and I felt that the special abilities of the minions were largely underused in the game, as they are primarily utilised in the area where the minions are first obtained and rarely thereafter.

I was also disappointed that a large part of the game was spent obtaining the Red, Green and Blue Minions. This plot was fine in the first game where you are encountering the minion gameplay for the first time, but in a sequel it felt like needlessly retreading old ground that could have been covered in a tutorial. If rescuing minions needed to be done for plot purposes, then why not introduce new minion types, rather than having a rehash of part of the plot of the first game.

The minion control also felt a bit awkward at times, with it sometimes refusing to allow you to sweep the horde where and when you want to. The targeting at times could also be a bit difficult as well, as there were occasions when I could not lock onto the target I was after. A more significant fault that I came across though, is that sometimes if you managed to complete a mission but bypassed one of the steps, then you still had to complete the step or later missions would not unlock.

On one occasion this was a game wrecking flaw as I had completed steps in a mission before they had registered as a task needing completion, and the game did not recognise that the mission had been accomplished when they did register, and the mission could not be reset to the start. Fortunately I had kept multiple saves so my loss of game progression was minimal, but if I had not this would have led to having to restart the game from the beginning.

I also thought that Overlord 2 was not sufficiently different from the first game and was too short, as it can easily be completed in under 20 hours. The plot while enjoyable also seemed weaker than in the first game, and the twist at the end while amusing did not measure up to the reveal at the end of the first game.

In terms of the graphics and sound in Overlord 2, the graphics seemed to be slightly better than in the original game, but as usual I encountered occasional background texture pop-ins. I enjoyed the music in Overlord 2, which at its best added to the drama of the mission. The voice acting was well done, and aided by a humorous script. While the main plot of the game was short it was enjoyable, and this was in a large part due to the voice acting in the game.

There is a local and online multiplayer component to Overlord 2, but as in the first game it is limited to 2 players. There are 2 main multiplayer modes, versus and co-operative which each have 2 types of play. The co-operative mode is based around survival and completing a specific objective, rather than being a co-operative version of the single player game, while the versus mode was based around gathering treasure or holding territories rather than being a straight forward battle between Overlords.

I was not particularly enamoured by the multi-player as it felt superfluous to the game, and also found it difficult to find matches. I thought that the co-operative modes would have been better if adapted into an alternative single player mode. While the versus multiplayer suffers from a lack of maps and from it being limited to 2 players, when more players would have made it more enjoyable and competitive.

Despite the limitations and flaws in Overlord 2 I do think that it is a reasonably good game and I enjoyed playing through it. However the relative lack of innovation in the game, made it feel like playing an expansion to the first game rather than it being a game in its own right. This and its relatively short length makes Overlord 2 a game I would recommend renting rather than buying.

Tagged as Codemasters, Overlord, Overlord 2, Triump Studios