Overlord Review

The downsides to the game mostly come down to some trickier areas where controlling your minions may become a pain in the ass. Not in a particularly bad way, but bear in mind that at some point, Overlord may become more complex than your average action adventure (for the sheer amount of multi-minion-tasking). In the process, a few brown minions may get stuck in the water or refuse to come back to you, and presto, you might have a pissed off gamer. Nothing one couldn't handle (a gamer with a normal attention span that is), but some of you may be, um, pickier than others.

The only other noticeable drawback was the frame rate on my Intel CoreDuo 6600, 2GB RAM, 7900GT rig. I'm not sure how Overlord works on the Xbox 360, but it was quite slow on my PC, even on 'medium' settings. The controls, on the other hand, (contrary to what I'm hearing about the 360 version) are very intuitive, straightforward and easy to use. As I said, the core gameplay component is very well done, controls included.

Overall, I would definitely recommend you go out and buy this game. It's got a surprising amount of depth and innovation in a lot of different areas of design, excellent humor, art work and sound. The very non-linear-feeling main campaign gets progressively difficult as you rise in power, so there will be plenty of challenges in store for you.

The steep hardware requirements on the PC, coupled with some minor control issues, may present a problem (sluggish frame rates primarily), but I'm hoping things may get better once a few patches have been released. Well, one can only hope really. If all else fails, that new NVIDIA card is a mere five hundred bucks - an absolute bargain.