Overlord Not That Good
On Swavek’s recommendation, I downloaded the demo for the PC version of Overlord. It has an interesting premise, not unlike Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper from 1997, where the plot revolves around destroying everything that is good so that your evil influence may grow. The difference is that Dungeon Keeper was a realtime strategy game (like Starcraft), Overlord is more of an action game. I really liked Dungeon Keeper, back in the day, so I decided to give this game a try.
You play as the “Overlord” and you progress in the game by earning better and more simultaneous minions. For example, the demo starts with five brown goblins following you around. You can command them to do your bidding as you wander through the 3D game terrain. As a reward for finishing level one, I got an additional five goblins to command. This comes in handy when you need ten simultaneous goblins to overcome a particular barrier. Later, you also get more powerful minions, since the brown goblins are the weakest type. Different types of minion allow for different abilities and immunities, but only the browns were available during the demo.
The problems I had are with the controls. The game engine seems to be based on the Fable engine (which was a fun game that I played until the end), but I didn’t have any trouble controlling my character in Fable. For the most part, your goblin horde does most of your actions for you, but they seem to have some path-finding and obstacle-avoidance issues. A tree trunk in your way will spell your doom. There are plenty of things to destroy in the terrain, but you can’t target them individually, so you have to “sweep” your goblins around the countryside and they act accordingly (breaking urns, smashing pumpkins, etc.). You do this by pointing in a given direction, and your horde rushes off that way like a flock of birds.
Sweeping seems to be the way to go when controlling your goblins, but they often miss things and there is no way to directly control their behavior (“this one goes here, that one goes there!”). To make matters worse, you can only sweep in one direction at a time. The camera angle seems to freeze when you start sweeping, so you have to let go of the sweep command for a moment, then move your character to see in another direction, and then resweep and hope that your goblins didn’t get stuck behind a log in the meantime. Personally, I think that I’d rather have that micromanagement ability that Dungeon Keeper allowed for.
Similar Posts:
- Blizzard Announced Diablo 3 And I Died (2)
- Logitech G5 Laser Gaming Mouse (0)
- I Think That I’ve Played Borderlands To Death (1)
Recent Comments