It’s easy to come to the conclusion that the folks at Codemasters are a little twisted, but in a delightfully devious way.
For those who haven’t played the original, Overlord II plays essentially like an evil Pikmin: you, the Overlord, lead your gremlin-like minions against the forces of everything good and kind. And while your minions do most of the work, the Overlord himself is not without his own skills when it comes to doling out evil and destruction on a more intimate level. Armed with various weapons and spells, the Overlord can not only backup his minions, but also get straight into the fray himself, hacking and casting his way to victory.
In keeping with the game’s action-adventure-cum-RPG core, you control the Overlord and his minions from a third-person perspective while doing such evil things as harassing a yeti into breaking down a wall, beating arctic/Scottish fishermen down with your battle axe, and clubbing baby seals to collect Lifeforce to summon more minions. And of course, there can never be enough environmentalist, hippy elves with oddly large vocabularies just begging to be overrun with minions..
While all this evil may seem somewhat dark or cruel, Overlord II takes itself about as seriously as a Bruce Campbell movie, and hey, evil is what it’s all about anyway. Humor and parody are the mainstays of this game, and you’ll likely be too amused by what’s happening on screen to be all that worried by Overlord II’s cartoon-style evil antics.
On the practical side, Overlord II’s controls are easy to learn and fairly comfortable, and the game’s good audio is complemented by great voice acting and entertaining interjections from your minions. The graphics are crisp and clean, but hardly photo-realistic.
If you enjoy hacking, burning, and marauding your way across an otherwise peaceful kingdom, then it looks like Overlord II’s gameplay will leave you saying, “I may be bad... but I feel gooood..."
-
- Overlord II
- Score: 3.50/5.0
-
