Post by boogieknight on Aug 8, 2009 19:14:11 GMT -5
"The evil that men do- is nothing compared to the evil that we do." -Gnarl's Musings
Overlord II is like a chick who shares your enthusiasms, does the freaky stuff you want to do, has a nice body, but her face is something you have to prepare yourself for before you look at it. Spending time with this game is enjoyable, but the glaring flaws do catch you unawares and make it tough to explain yourself to your friends.
As with it's predecessor, the premise is simple: You are a big bad overlord on a mission to rebuild his empire and bring about regime change you can believe in. With the proper combination of brute force and fighting dirty, the overlord must lay waste to the various fantasy tropes while walking the path of evil. A mistake of the previous game was allowing the player to choose between good and evil, but this is corrected as the player is now given a choice on the style of evil he wants to employ. Domination is about enslaving those within your domain so they work hard to gather the resources to fuel your war machine, while Destruction entails slaughtering and smashing everything in sight (which allows the player to get more resources quickly only once). Even the magic spells that the overlord employs shares the dual nature and can be developed in the direction of the overlord's alignment. However, when you are first getting started, it's easy to accidentally destroy things with the undeveloped magic and frustrate your efforts to become a pure Domination Overlord (That and I found out that to fully enslave a town you had to break down doors to houses to force out the peasants for you to enslave them).
Controls can be a little irksome as the same method of controlling the camera also sends a group of minions to a target manually. The lock-on can be frustrating when dealing with multiple hostiles, especially when there are civili- future slaves mixed in, but I honestly found myself rarely using lock-on even in those confrontations. Every sequel must have new featuresm and we have two new mechanics: Minion Possession and sailing the high seas. It's easy to grasp that the idea is that the player is able to give overlord level control over minions in areas that the Overlord may not be able to reach yet and at long distances. In short, you function like the overlord but with pisspoor health and no magic to speak of. Don't get me wrong, I understand the idea behind it, it's just not a very good idea. Had some serious effort been put into it, the sailing might have been pretty awesome. All the player gets is a very barebones mechanic which leaves the player fighting the system more than the enemies on the sailing level.
This brings me to level design, either this game was made by people with serious ADD, or for people with serious ADD. While playing, you have an understanding of what the goals are, but the exact means will elude you for a while until you get caught up in a second objective which magically ends up solving your other problem along the way. Just about every level feels like a series of corridors even as you explore what appears to be an open world. The new mini-map is mostly helpful in letting the player know where the rails are for the track he's on. Of all the flaws, it's the feeling like the game is one giant frickin' tutorial is the most glaring.
Still, the game has it's charms. Commanding an army of monsters who look and act like the critters from Gremlins is far more fun than the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. As shallow as the characterization is, the mistresses have enough personality to add to the humorous commentary of Gnarl during the missions. Which reminds me of another problem, stand still when a character at home base is telling you something, because if you move too far another cutscene will overlap what the home base character is saying and so you miss out on the tips and gags (I think this also fits under poor level design). Anyway, comedy is the main strength of the game and I think that it is strong enough and persistent enough to justify playing through it at least once.
Overall, this game is mixed up in what it wants to be as a game, but the themes and jokes blend well with the inverted morality that lambasts the formulas of the fantasy genre.
Overlord II is like a chick who shares your enthusiasms, does the freaky stuff you want to do, has a nice body, but her face is something you have to prepare yourself for before you look at it. Spending time with this game is enjoyable, but the glaring flaws do catch you unawares and make it tough to explain yourself to your friends.
As with it's predecessor, the premise is simple: You are a big bad overlord on a mission to rebuild his empire and bring about regime change you can believe in. With the proper combination of brute force and fighting dirty, the overlord must lay waste to the various fantasy tropes while walking the path of evil. A mistake of the previous game was allowing the player to choose between good and evil, but this is corrected as the player is now given a choice on the style of evil he wants to employ. Domination is about enslaving those within your domain so they work hard to gather the resources to fuel your war machine, while Destruction entails slaughtering and smashing everything in sight (which allows the player to get more resources quickly only once). Even the magic spells that the overlord employs shares the dual nature and can be developed in the direction of the overlord's alignment. However, when you are first getting started, it's easy to accidentally destroy things with the undeveloped magic and frustrate your efforts to become a pure Domination Overlord (That and I found out that to fully enslave a town you had to break down doors to houses to force out the peasants for you to enslave them).
Controls can be a little irksome as the same method of controlling the camera also sends a group of minions to a target manually. The lock-on can be frustrating when dealing with multiple hostiles, especially when there are civili- future slaves mixed in, but I honestly found myself rarely using lock-on even in those confrontations. Every sequel must have new featuresm and we have two new mechanics: Minion Possession and sailing the high seas. It's easy to grasp that the idea is that the player is able to give overlord level control over minions in areas that the Overlord may not be able to reach yet and at long distances. In short, you function like the overlord but with pisspoor health and no magic to speak of. Don't get me wrong, I understand the idea behind it, it's just not a very good idea. Had some serious effort been put into it, the sailing might have been pretty awesome. All the player gets is a very barebones mechanic which leaves the player fighting the system more than the enemies on the sailing level.
This brings me to level design, either this game was made by people with serious ADD, or for people with serious ADD. While playing, you have an understanding of what the goals are, but the exact means will elude you for a while until you get caught up in a second objective which magically ends up solving your other problem along the way. Just about every level feels like a series of corridors even as you explore what appears to be an open world. The new mini-map is mostly helpful in letting the player know where the rails are for the track he's on. Of all the flaws, it's the feeling like the game is one giant frickin' tutorial is the most glaring.
Still, the game has it's charms. Commanding an army of monsters who look and act like the critters from Gremlins is far more fun than the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. As shallow as the characterization is, the mistresses have enough personality to add to the humorous commentary of Gnarl during the missions. Which reminds me of another problem, stand still when a character at home base is telling you something, because if you move too far another cutscene will overlap what the home base character is saying and so you miss out on the tips and gags (I think this also fits under poor level design). Anyway, comedy is the main strength of the game and I think that it is strong enough and persistent enough to justify playing through it at least once.
Overall, this game is mixed up in what it wants to be as a game, but the themes and jokes blend well with the inverted morality that lambasts the formulas of the fantasy genre.