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Thursday 6 March, 2008
SUMMARY:
I had always heard good things about pikmin, but i had balked at the fact that there was some sort of time limit and if you don't beat the game within the time limit then you have to start again. I've never liked these sort of time restraints, and I will not suffer through them unless absolutely necessary. So, when I heard an Overlord review that likened it to a more sinister version of pikmin but without the time constraints, I had to try it.
As previously stated, Overlord is a lot like the game Pikmin, except instead of a space ship captain who cras landed on a planet you are a mysterious and presumably evil overlord that was just awaken from a deep slumber, instead of attempting to make your way off the planet in a limited number of days you must try to harrass the local and bend them to your will, and instead of using cute multicolored plant-like creatures to do it, you harness a small army of differently colored "minions" that spread pain and suffering in their own unique ways. Like pikmin, it is nearly impossible to accomplish much in this game without the help of your smal horde of underlings. As you progress through the game, you receive the ability to call more and more minions to control simultaneously on the game screen -- and inevitably throw wave after wave of them at obstacles or enemies in your path, or even into pits of lava if that's your thing, oblivious and/or apathetic to their suffering.
Your job apparently, as the Overlord, is to basically.. well.. be the Overlord. Of course, you can't just "be an Overlord" by sitting on top of your high spiky tower and shouting orders at anybody who cares to listen -- especially if the entire number of those who care to listen is the very same few goblins who woke you from your mysterious slumber (by rubbing acid in your eyes no less) in the first place. You wake up from your slumber to a mysteriously run down castle, without even a humble tower heart to teleport you to and from your tower into other areas of your domain. Thus, you set out to repair your castle, recollect the minion hives to be able to summon new colors of minions with new powers, filling your tower with slave wenches, finding a mistress, and taking back the will of the people of your domain, be that by savagly beating or killing those who disagree with your word (which your minions thorougly enjoy) or by showering them with love and affection until they desire no other than to rule under you (much to the chagrin of your minions).
GAMEPLAY:
The controls were a bit unintuitive at first, but I suppose that's to be expected considering how I have never before in my life attempted anything even remotely similar to controlling a small hoard of people using only a mouse and a keyboard. Well actually that's not completely true -- I have PLENTY of experience controlling "the zerg" in starcratf -- but that is not at all anything close to attempting to control monsters in what I like to refer to as an "extended first person perspective," where the game feels a lot like you are in first person perspective but the camera zooms out enough to give you a good view of yourself as well as a slightly wider view of your surroundings. In starcraft, you do a lot of pointing and clicking -- click on a unit under your command, then click on the place you want him to move to. I found myself attempting to do a lot of this when I first started playing Overlord, and not being able to was very frustrating. It felt a lot like trying to orchestrate with my hands behind my back. "How can I possibly be expected to control these minions," I thought to myself, "if I'm tied to this damn Overlord character and can't click on anything?!"
Quite easily, as it turned out. As I progressed through the game, I found that I had been attempting to control the minions as if they were chess pieces, picking them up and placing them where I wanted them to move to, or where I wanted them to attack. As I got more into the game, however, I found that what I should have been doing was controlling the minions as if they were extensions of my own body, "sweeping" the minions aross the landscape in front of me by holding down the correct mouse buttons and sweeping my mouse in a similar direction across my mouse pad. The game seemed to suppord this philosophy, as my character representation on the screen even raised his arm to control the minions in the same way I imagined myself doing it. I could also send minions to certain locations or to manipulate certain objects by moving my camera to look directly at the thing I want to send a minion at and clicking the left mouse button, but I strongly prefered sweeping them.
I just gained the ability to set waypoints for groups of my minions, which should add an interesting new level onto how I control my minions. Now I can ambush monsters by strategically setting up my minions in certain positions where they will remain until moved or provoked. Unfortunately, there seems to be a few bugs with this system, as after some of my brown (melee/tank) minions under the control of my waypoints are attacked by monsters they seem the mainatin their new position next to the monster's corpse and don't defend themselves when attacked by a new monster. Also, they don't chain agro, so only a relatively small number of minions actually engage the monsters from the waypoint.
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