Overlord (PC, 360)

[Centy]

Just played the PC demo of this and it's bloody great fun but then a game where you're meant to be evil usually is :evil:

You are a giant warrior man who looks alot like a certain LotR character and you have to make people bow down to you by being evil or eviler needless to say its shaping up great so far.

You basically are playing a Pikmin game as you conjure minions and control them exactly the same as you would pikmin except you run around with a dirty big axe and magic spells. It looks gorgeous and it's genuinely funny and should be amazing if its more freeform.

PC DEMO

You'll need a monster to get this to play at a decent framerate but if you can please try it.

You can also get the demo on the 360 via the market place

[pickled]

yeah i downloladed to demo for the xbox, have played it for a little bit, does seem like it could be a lot of fun

[Hendo]

Centy wrote:

You'll need a monster to get this to play at a decent framerate

I think this picture says more than words possibly could.

[Sly Reflex]

Everybody back! Clear! *Defibs thread*

This game then. I'm shocked, as it's really good. I see a lot of comparisons to Pikmin, and while some parts are it's not like Pikmin at all. Your guy is much more than a cursor that can be attacked, the way it plays out is instead of controlling a mob that swamp enemies you can be more precise by sending your guys to do your bidding.

For instance I'd send a pack of my guys to fight the enemies head on and leave them to it, with the remainders I'd be using them to ramsack homes (which enemies spawn from) on an individual basis while providing support for my guys if it is needed. So you have all this stuff happening, the fighting, elite mobs needing magic thrown at them, spawn points needing to be capped, all the time your guys are running to where you're telling them, doing their job and then running back to you with potions, gold or currency for buying gremlins.

Sometimes they find drops from killing or vandalising which they equip themselves. Sometimes you look at what the next person is equipped with, know he's going to either demolish the task or struggle with it and send more or less gremlins to go do your bidding. You have to take stock and know that a gremlin that's just birthed from hell isn't going to fare as well as a gremlin that's fought a bit as one has a loincloth and a twig and the other has a pitchfork and a full set of armour. That's just for the "Browns" as the game calls them, the "Reds" excel at throwing fire, so it's often a case of clearing an area of altitude out for your Reds to stand on so they can pelt enemies with fire while the Browns run around raping and looting.

The best way I can put it is that it's really like managing a riot or a gatecrash where the name of the game is causing as much damage as possible, maximising everyones presence so you can hit the hardest with what weight you're carrying.

It's a proper shame that it looks like nobody here played it, I feel some people would maybe get quite a lot of enjoyment out of it.

[illdog]

I played it, i didn't like it but that was all me. I just wasn't in the mood for the type of game it was offering at the time. I have the Wii version, I might check that out at some point.

[AndyKurosaki]

I played both of them, didn't get particularly far in either of them.Not because I didn't like them, as they're certainly fun. But once you had to start using your brain and select appropriate units for a situation, I completely fucked it up. Eventually I put it to one side, and that was it really.

[Sly Reflex]

Played a hefty chunk tonight. I managed to grab the Green monsters, who can absorb poisons and other crap that kills other stuff. The nasty little bastards can kill stuff really quickly if you attack stuff from the back with them, and if you tell them to hold a point they'll go invisible and totally fuck up anything that gets close that happens to have it's back to them.

I'm on the quest for some Blues now, which the game reliably tells me I can use in water. The pace of the game totally changes when you've got 3 colours under your belt, it's a bit like Command and Conquer where you try and goad bigger enemies into fighting on your terms. There's no way you can just rush and overpower stuff unless you're willing to take the casualties that will happen, what with the Reds and Greens being so squishy and kind of hard to come by you don't want to waste them.

This game is really heavy on satire too, it's very self knowing that it's a game and it uses every opportunity to mock at stuff in game and in games.

[AndyKurosaki]

Yeah the sense of humor is great, love the way the little minions say stuff like "for da overlord". It's definitely fun, I just got stuck and it got put to the side.

[Sly Reflex]

Finally tracked down the Blues. Fucking hell. The game was telling me that I needed Blues. "You need Blues! They can go in water!" the game repeats over and over again. It doesn't give you any indication that you need to leave the dungeon you're in and go look in a different area. Cunt.

So now I have all the different coloured minions the games blown wide open. Literally. I've not got a friggin clue what I'm meant to be doing or what direction I should be going. I dunno if it's a sign of a bad game or whether I've just been softened up by years of handholding. Frustratingly there's stuff I can see to collect, but can't get to it still. It's like the game's teasing me.

[AndyKurosaki]

Precisely, I kept firing up a gamefaqs guide as I didn't know what I was meant to be doing. After the 5th time of that I went "oh fuck it", and that was the end really.

[Sly Reflex]

Aaaaaaand that's the dark forest done. You know what would really benefit this game? A map. I spent far too long ambling around that area of the game just looking for a way to cross that bloody river.

The boss fight for that area was fucking suh-weet. Totally threw me, I wasn't expecting that to happen. I sort of thought that the game was based on the seven deadly sins although I wasn't sure up until now. The first lot was based on gluttony, the second sloth and by the looks of the way the next part of the game is going we're looking at lust. I really hope they're as interesting or surprising as sloth.

I'm 10 hours into it now. HLTB has the game pegged at around 20 hours, so according to them I'm about halfway through. It just depends if they count the time people spent meandering around wondering wtf was meant to happen next.

[Sly Reflex]

I stumbled around the world some more and discovered greed. I tell you what, pissed up dwarves fight hard.

I also had a lol-worthy fight against a giant slug. I blew all my minions up by accident as I stood on the bombs to throw fire. I wiped 25 out in one big fuck off explosions. The annoying thing is that my browns were all levelled up with top shit armour and weapons, so it might have been a mistake, but it was hella costly, not just because of the lives lost in the explosion, but because of the lives that are going to be lost further into the game because my dudes are running around naked with clubs and the enemies are head to toe in armour with steel weaponry.

I wish that when you got a man down he stayed there for a bit longer so you could resurrect him with a blue. The window for saving dead minions is tiny, not to mention that when you send blues in to pick up fallen troops sometimes they join the fight instead of pulling the dead bodies out of the melee. You can afford to lose a guy here and there, but some of the quests go on for ages and you can't bring more minions into battle unless you want to trail right out of the instance and get them from spawn. It wouldn't be the first time I've gone in with a full compliment of minions and ended up facing off against the boss with less than 10, half of which are fucking useless for that particular battle.

[Sly Reflex]

Awesome, I think the game's glitched out on me.

EDIT: Nope, it just did an horrific job of telling me where I should be going. I think the game is about to wrap up any time soon. I've 3 more sins to deal with, although I have what I think is envy in my sights. I had to stop playing because the area I was currently in was a proper saggy tit of an area, the mechanic they introduced doesn't work right and you can only do it at certain intervals because you're using things that are on timers. Annoying doesn't really begin to cover it.

[Sly Reflex]

Yeah, this is fucking difficult at the end.

I enjoyed the game overall, some of the design seems proper archaic though. Some of the facial animations are really bad, it's amazing to see how far we've come in 7 years.

I think this game is a bit of a rough gem, Having played it all there's some bit that really stand out that bring the game down, like not telling you where to go and constant dead ends that are not really dead ends but a game mechanic that just says nothing at all. You just have to work it out. Also bosses that have health bars that'd touch the sun if you were to stand them on their ends.

Anyway, done now. Hopefully the other Overlord games in the list are a bit more polished.