Fantastic: a near masterpiece
posted by rjcpdx (MINNEAPOLIS, MN) Sep 23, 2008
Member since Jan 2004
1
out of
1
gamers (100%) found this review helpful
Overlord simply oozes imagination, wit and fun. It's easily one of the best games in many years, combining the thrill of early Warcraft games with a fairly original third-person control scheme and an unusually morbid sense of humor.
There's a ton of nonlinear play here for people who don't need games to tell them what to do. The complexity of the game mechanic isn't too hard to grasp, but it's deep enough so that you can get very involved in both strategy and tactics.
The design of the world is a sheer treat, a massively sprawling medieval realm where you can go about causing infinite mischief above and below the surface. Hand in hand with great visual design, the game also manages not to descend to the cretinous level of most recent game storytelling. For a change dialogue is witty, piercing, even sardonic. I loved razing some helpless town of plodding burghers with my little ghoulies while the narrator's voice cackled and praised my evil deeds; ah, evil. There's lots of it here. You do like burning down towns and upsetting limp-wristed elves, don't you?
Perfect, then? Not really. You'll do a bit more backtracking through the world than you should. Load times were irritating (a PS3 hardware limitation, actually). And the game is way too long to complete, although I can't see why that should matter. The keep enhancements idea is fairly silly, the mark of designers who seem unable to know when to stop adding features to a project they clearly love.
In a gaming market of cubic zirconia, Overlord is a glittering gem. Not to be missed!
Was this review helpful?
Report
Abuse
