Overlord: Dark Legend - Game Review

I went through a string of emotions playing Overlord: Dark Legend. First there was excitement at the prospect of playing a sequel to 2007’s entertaining strategy game Overlord. Then there was enjoyment as I began playing the game. Then there was puzzlement as I began to wonder why, even though it reminded me of the first game, I was feeling kind of bored. Then there was sadness as I realized that the game was not a worthy sequel. And finally, when I saw how the game should have been done, there was anger.

In Legend’s underdeveloped story, the Overlord is a put-upon royal child with a couple of cruel siblings who is given a scary suit of armor and the ability to call forth weird little creatures that can tear apart enemies. One minion is not especially strong, but in a pack they are deadly. They are also completely devoted to the Overlord, going where he directs them and gathering treasure which they carry to him with a cry of “for the Overlord!”

The conceit of the game is that the Overlord is a bad dude, referred to by his chief minion advisor as “Your Evilness,” yet the game is made up primarily of the Overlord using his minions to help villagers with wolf problems and the like. You don’t even have the option of doing evil things like killing villagers. The game’s designers seem to feel that just referring to a character as evil and making him look evil is enough, even if you put him in the role of a do-gooder.

Legend is essentially an adult version of Nintendo’s Pikmin, which involved controlling an army of flower creatures to explore an alien planet. The Overlord series takes that same basic gameplay and gives it a more adult slant. Minions, like Pikmin’s flower people, come in different varieties. At first you only have one type of minion, but eventually you gain access to fire-proof minions and minions that can swim. These can be used to breach various obstacles.

You control minions with the Wii remote, but this feels a little too much like herding cats. Minions will sometimes go where you point, and sometimes not. Often they seem to not understand that they can walk around the Overlord. You can move your minion hordes into boxes and treasure chests to break them open for items, but the minions are too dumb to pick up these items without your guiding them. At times it seemed easier to use the Overlord’s axe to simply break things without the minions help.

One can also turn minions into bombs by picking them up, strangling them and then letting them run into a wall. It’s a cute but poorly implemented idea; it sometimes took multiple attempts to grab a minion, and aiming was tricky and inaccurate. It is necessary to do this occasionally to break down a wall, but while the game says you can also use minions this way in battles, it seemed like more bother than it was worth.

Controlling ravaging hordes of minions is amusing for a while, but there is little challenge in the game’s combat and dead-easy puzzles. It is possible, for example, to order fire-throwing minions to stand on a cliff overlooking enemies and attack from a distance, but for the most part you can simply tell your minions to go fight something and just let things play out. You can also attack enemies yourself, both with your axe and with a variety of magic spells (I found chain lightning the most useful).

Repetitive and easy, I found myself increasingly uninterested in playing the game, so I decided to take a break and play Overlord II, a different Overlord game for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Playing on the 360, I encountered a radically different game. First off, the Overlord is genuinely evil. You begin the game as a child Overlord who uses his minions to kill bullying children, then destroys much of his hometown before going into the wilderness to have his minions club baby seals, murder nature-loving elves and kill and enslave local villagers.

With its easy to control, fast-moving minions and comical mean-spiritedness, Overlord II gave me more fun in two hours than Legend had in seven.

Overlord II was developed by Triumph Studios, who created the first game, while Legend was made by Climax Studios, and therein lies the problem. Climax specializes in ports and literal, uninspired sequels, and Legend falls firmly in the second category, offering something that looks and plays somewhat like the original Overlord but just isn’t all that much fun.

Playing Overlord II made me mad, because it reminded me of how publishers treat the Wii like a second class citizen, offering bland, easy, uninspired games while assigning their top designers to the other consoles. What is frustrating is that Legend is not inferior because of the Wii’s underpowered graphics – the game looks pretty good – it is inferior conceptually and in terms of level design, things that are not affected by the power of the console. It’s just a lazy game.

I gave up on Legend when I was about 85% of the way through the game. I was surprised to see I’d gotten so close to the end, since I’d played for less than eight hours, but it turns out that there’s simply not a lot of content to the game.

Legend is not a terrible game, and with the console’s emphasis on casual games it is always nice to see something that is closer to a hardcore game, so I won’t say you definitely shouldn’t buy this one. But don’t play Legend if there’s any possibility that you will have the opportunity to play Overlord II. Because that will just make you so mad that you will want to send rampaging minions to take down a few game designers.