Previews: Overlord

Taking a look at the demo and some developer’s thoughts.

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By Mike Hofler                        
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If you’ve ever seen the movie Gremlins, you’ll fall into one of two groups of people. Either you’re the type who wanted your own cute cuddly Mogwai, or you thought it would be awesome to have your very own pack of gremlins rampaging around at your command. If you fall into the latter group, this game is for you.

Overlord is an action adventure game coming out for the Xbox 360 and PC in which you control an evil overlord who commands a horde of minions, very gremlin-like in appearance and personality, which you use to establish your evil empire. Here is what developer Triumph Studios says about the different types of minions under your control:

Kevin Mullard: There are four types of minions that you’ll come across in Overlord. You start with a few Browns. These are your fighters. They attack, beat up, and knock over anything that you send them against – even if it means their certain death. Next come the reds. These are ranged attackers, who hurl fireballs at opponents. They’re also fire immune. Greens are your stealthy assassins. They’ll try and get behind enemies, leap onto their backs and stab away dealing massive damage. Blues are magic users, who deal magical damage against enemies, can enter water without drowning, but most importantly can resurrect any minions who die in battle.

(Excerpt from Chris Jensen’s interview at http://www.gamealmighty.com/)


The way your minions go about their tasks is what makes things interesting. When sent to attack a flock of sheep, your minions will jump on the backs of the sheep and ride them for a moment before clubbing them on the head. Send them to attack something in the kitchen, and a few will come back wearing pots on their heads and wielding rolling pins. It can be really amusing as you take a look at your minions to notice that one of them is wearing a jack-o-lantern on its head, very reminiscent of how gremlins would wreck everything and play with whatever objects were at hand. This sense of humor is found throughout the game, not only in the way your minions act, but also with interactions with NPC’s and in how the story unfolds.

The game starts off with the minions apparently raising you from the dead, and then suiting you up in appropriately evil-looking armor. You inherit a rather dilapidated tower, and are informed that heroes looted everything of value when they killed off the previous master, as heroes are like to do to evil overlords. Your main task in your rise to power will be to track down certain items that were stolen from your tower, as well as the heroes who made off with your epic loot.

Before setting out on your mission, there is a quick tutorial to teach you how to use your minions to destroy everything in sight. You use the left analog stick to move around and the A button to attack, which you practice by beating on the court jester repeatedly. Once he runs out of reach and continues to mock you, you send your minions after him to bludgeon on him for a while. Pressing the right trigger will send your minions straight ahead, destroying all manners of enemies and objects that may be in their path. Alternatively you can use the right analog stick to control a pack of minions, leading them down a winding path you may not be able to navigate yourself to get at items or enemies.

After the tutorial, you are sent out to retrieve an orb that will allow you to teleport from your tower throughout the fantasy world in which you now find yourself. The first thing you will come across once you step into the world outside of your tower, described by Gnarl, your minion master and advisor, as a “lush, verdant abomination”, is a flock of sheep grazing in a field. Your minions will make quick work of these, and then come running back with the sheeps’ life force, which you can use to summon more minions. Any time your servants find any type of treasure, they will hold it high up in the air and coming running towards you with large smiles on their leathery faces shouting “Treasure!” or “For the Master!”.

The demo ends with a short boss fight against a Halfling hero who has been eating so much that he has grown to the size of a wagon. Your minion limit is raised up to 20, so you won’t have much problem with this boss as your minions swarm over him, climbing all over his body to pummel him with their various weapons. After defeating the boss, several peasants that were being held captive are freed and cheer for you, which gives us the first glimpse of one of the more interesting game mechanics of Overlord.

Over the course of the game you will come across many peasants, and will have a difficult decision to make. Do you leave them alive so that they worship you and pay tribute to you, in the process gaining you gold much more rapidly? Or do you kill them, harvesting their life force to create more minions, and increasing your corruption level, which will give you access to higher level spells?

That’s the story mode, but what about other modes of play? Triumph’s director and lead designer Lennart Sas had this to say:

Lennart Sas: Overlord multiplayer has two competitive game modes, and one co-operative. Slaughter is a form of death match where the score is determined by the number of kills on the enemy Overlord, his Minions, and random bystanders. Plunder is all about looting more stuff than your opponent. Finally, in Survival, it’s about the perverse act of two Overlords working together in order to stay alive as long as possible against a never ending stream of enemies.
(Excerpt from an interview at http://www.firingsquad.com/)

It seems like there will be plenty of opportunity to use and abuse your minions against friend and foe alike. Come June 26th players will get the chance to lead their minions into battle, or at least point them in the direction of what they want destroyed while watching from a safe distance. Either way you will grow in power, and then be left with this decision: Do I become evil? Or really REALLY evil?