Your army consists of four different types of minions - brown, red, green and blue - that each have different abilities. Browns are the basic grunts, good for dealing with things that need smashing. Reds are fire-hurlers, very handy for taking out enemies at a distance. Greens are immune to poison, therefore good for clearing a path through fields of toxic weeds, and are also sneaky little backstabbers. Blues are healers and can swim, unlike all the other minions who simply drown on coming into contact with water.
Feed the starving villagers or stock your own larder? Hmm...
Controlling your minions is often just a matter of highlighting a target and holding down the left mouse button to fire off a deadly stream of minions. As the game progresses, you'll find yourself selecting particular combinations of minions and directing them with increasingly strategic evil-ness. So you might use your reds to hurl fireballs from a certain point to distract an ogre, then send in your greens to attack the ogre from behind. You're also able to use your minions to get to areas that you're too big too reach. Holding down both mouse buttons lets you "sweep" your horde across tree roots, into hobbit holes or through gates to battle enemies that you'd rather keep at a sensible distance.
As you progress through the game, the condition of The Tower, your home base, slowly improves and additional rooms open up. We were able to set up a forge, where you can make new weapons and armour, and a dungeon that allows you try new tactics on captive creatures. The game also promises some kind of boudoir, where you can entertain a saucy mistress or two. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get that far into the game, though no doubt it'll all be done in the best possible taste.
When Overlord is firing on all cylinders - in the middle of a pitched battle, say, with minions running amok, fireballs going everywhere and your evil self overseeing the carnage and playfully chucking in spells here and there - it's tremendous fun. It has to be said, though, that when the dust settles you're often left with a feeling of "what next?" We spent an awful lot of time wandering into dead ends, back tracking and searching endlessly through nooks and crannies for the next trigger point. The game is in dire need of a map to highlight where points of interest are, or something to gently nudge you in the direction you need to be going. The areas are very large and it's a shame to see the manic energy of first contact with the enemy dissipate in favour of endless trudging about in search of something to kick things off again. Also, the minion sweeping mechanism doesn't yet feel tight enough. It's far too easy to send your minions plunging into a river to drown, which means you'll have a (possibly lengthy) trek back to a minion fountain to restock.
It's not easy being green. Or blue.
Overlord certainly looks lovely, and is packed full of terrific touches. There's a special kind of joy that comes from sending your rabid minions hurtling down into a idyllic village and watching it rapidly being reduced to a pile of shattered timbers. The multitude of ways you can deploy your minions adds a lot of depth to the game and the minion wrangling is an obvious highlight. For all its claims to evilness, it's not going to put off anyone but the most fragile and devout - everything is very tongue-in-cheek and it all comes off as naughty, rather than downright evil.
It'd be a dreadful shame if Overlord got undermined by too many dead ends and too much maze crawling. If the game can tighten up its occasionally saggy gameplay, there's no reason not to be optimistic. The Pikmin-gone-bad underpinnings, mischievous sense of humour and swarthy good looks all have it heading in the right direction.
Overlord is due for release on June 29th.
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