The increased scale and ability of your forces is quite empowering, especially as you go up against increasingly large and threatening enemies. For example, red minions are able to throw fireballs at foes, whereas blue minions are able to resurrect fallen comrades. It’s not just their numbers that increase either you also gain the ability to summon different coloured minions that possess unique skills. At this point, you really feel like you’re orchestrating a small, chaotic army. Whether you require the minions to attack enemies, raze a structure or smash up the landscape in search of gold and other items, the minions always act accordingly with an intelligence that betrays their appearance they’ll even arm themselves should they come across weapons and armour.Īlthough you start off with just a handful of minions, their numbers increase to a maximum of fifty over the course of the game. It’s also possible to set up sentry posts for a set number of the little guys, so it’s possible to block pathways that enemies might try to come down. In certain situations, it’s necessary to take direct control over the entire pack, and manually guide them through more complex paths. There’s a great deal of flexibility in controlling the minions by default, they’ll follow you around like a group of automated henchmen, or you can send them racing forwards to clash with whatever lays ahead.

Whilst your silent suit of armour strides through the countryside, they bound eagerly into the distance, causing mayhem and destruction with such wicked enthusiasm that it propels you through the game, inspiring you to even greater acts of vileness. The minions are a horde of small demonic creatures that accompany you through the game, and are more than happy to do your bidding. There’s a quick lesson in being evil through the medium of jester-kicking, and before you know it, you embark through the knowingly generic Tolkienesque landscape, ransacking villages, enslaving peasants, slaying corpulent trolls, rebuilding your imposing tower, and even taking a mistress to help you spend your ill-gotten gains. You take control of the titular Overlord who, at the start of the game, is woken from undeath only to be informed that his predecessor has been killed, and that the reputation of evil in the surrounding land is a joke. In fact, the most taxing quandary you’re likely to face is whether to immolate a peasant with a volley of fireballs, or set a rabid pack of impish minions upon him.

Overlord subverts this device by largely dispensing with the ‘good’ end of the moral spectrum, leaving you with choices that exist somewhere between ‘evil’ and ‘incredibly evil’. Deciding whether to save or harvest the Little Sisters in Bioshock, or judging which of Niko Bellic’s friends should live or die in Grand Theft Auto IV are the kind of choices that encourage players to emotionally invest in the gaming experience. In recent years, games have become increasingly concerned with creating moral dilemmas, asking players to make difficult decisions that not only challenge their own personal ethics, but also those of the character that they are roleplaying.

Overlord raising hell gameplay