Overlord: Raising Hell for the Playstation 3
Overlord was a very enjoyable game, for the time I played it. The characters were well-voiced and very likable. I compare them to the characters from a Jim Henson film, such as Labyrinth or The Dark Crystal.
The three main minions you'll be spending time with are your mentor, a minion named Gnarl, The Jester, and Giblet. Gnarl is the first minion you'll get to know, as he travels with you for your first mission, and basically shows you the ropes. The Jester comes next--you first meet him while you're beating the crap out of him! He's part of the battle tutorial, teaching you how to attack and lock on, how to follow your enemies and thoroughly squash them. Giblet is almost unnoticeable, except for the fact that Gnarl has taken a liking to him, and therefore he is mentioned here and there, and eventually in charge of your castle's forge.
Through spending time with your minions and building up your castle and reputation, you start to experience a fun, quirky story. While the storyline doesn't shock anyone, the freedom you have and the choices you're allowed to make does ensure that it's enjoyable. Like the game
Fable, throughout the course of the gameplay, you will choose whether you'd like to be a good guy, a friend to the people, and an overall wuss--or if you'll fulfill your castle's expectations of being King Badass. This means stealing and pillaging, stealing the town's maidens, and basically being a greedy, nasty guy. Making choices is always a fun thing in a video game, and for the most part it goes rather smoothly here.
One thing, though--I did everything possible to be an evil overlord, and yet the Jester will still call me "Friend to the Flowers and Trees!" just because I didn't kill a sacred tree in the forest of the Elves quickly enough. Well, excuse me, I wasn't aware there was a time limit for destruction. I'll have to keep that in mind. Nothing kills your 'Oh yeah, I'm bad' mood like going home to your keep and hearing that you're friendly with flowers.
Another thing this game has that people will like: Customization! Choices include
- what color cloth your person is wearing
- how your weapon and armor look
- a choice between sisters as your wife
- the cosmetics of the exterior and interior of your castle
- Attack and Defense
- HP & MP stats, as well as health regeneration and max. number of minions you can hold
The graphics of this game will not blow your mind, but they are very nice and suit the game well.
Bosses will show up and confront you, like in most games. Melvin, the halfling hero, provides plenty of amusement with his puzzles. At first, he seems like just a regular boss... that explodes.... but later, in the Raising Hell expansion, he actually poses some fun puzzles. First, you need to lead him to food dishes in the right order, but it's more complicated than that, with switches that need to be activated and monsters that need to be taken out. Next, it's a game of "Breakout", where you must bounce Melvin against the doors you need broken, because he's such a huge ball of lard. Lastly, it's a few holes of golf, where you must "putt" Melvin, in one shot, to where he needs to be. Luckily, his body provides plenty of bounce, so that your one shot is rather powerful and lengthy.
Sir William the Black of Heaven's Peak is another boss. He has been seduced by succubus, and joined some sort of cult. Consequently, the town is hit with some sort of evil, magical plague and most of the city turns into a horde of zombies. Yes, zombies. I was surprised--Resident Evil, anyone? This was actually one of my favorite areas to play in. Your goal is to defeat Sir William, and free the city from the grip of plague. I enjoyed this battle because Sir William is such a selfish wimp, and it was fun to beat him up, and because while battling him, you meet one of your choices for a wife, which was quite interesting. You also meet Sir William later on in the Raising Hell expansion pack, where you solve puzzles by dragging his body from place to place and sticking him in different contraptions in order to fix things.
The last boss I'm going to mention is Oberon, the sleeping lord of the elves. He has fallen into a restless, magical dream state, and is controlling the entire forest from the foot of a great tree. Through this tree he has poisoned the land, darkening it and making it lose its former sense of peace and goodness. The land is suffering greatly, and the elves implore you to help. Enemies include unicorns, giant frogs, scuttling poisonous insects, and minotaurs, all of which are somehow controlled by Oberon. Once you weaken the great tree by hacking at its very long, complicated roots, you sock it to him and open the gateway to the dwarven lands. It's actually a lot of fun, once you finish with the roots--That's the difficult part.
The only bad things I see in this game are that it can freeze or slow down sometimes. I'll be playing, and my 30 or so minions will be pulling something, I'll be too close to them, and everything will just stop. The sounds still work, I can flip the camera around, but nothing else. Luckily it still allows you to access the menu, so you can just load, but it really breaks up the action. Granted, it only froze on me once, and slowed down maybe 5 or 6 times out of 24 hours playtime, so it's not a severe issue. The gameplay can get frustrating at times, if you forget where you should go or miss a doorway, but again, this only happened to me once or twice. Eventually, though, the big problem for me was that it got stale. Nothing was propelling me to complete this game after playing it for 23hr & 44 min. Yes, the game is fun to play, the characters are lively, and the choices are wonderful, but.... sometime later you wish that the characters were just a little
more lively, or perhaps that there were
more choices. The game is still pretty great, though I would only rent it. I might have to check out Overlord II someday....
