Atomic Nerds

Society has lied to you. Diamonds are not a girl’s best friend, and dog is not man’s. Anybody’s best friend, as it turns out, is a horde of manic little psychopaths prepared to carry out your every demand.

Overlord, for the XBox 360 or PC, is another entry in the “What if you were playing on the bad guys’ side in a fantasy series for once?” genre. I haven’t played Dungeon Keeper, which I’m told is the gold standard of this genre, so I have no idea if it’s any better or worse than that, but it’s a fair sight better than any of the others I’ve tried.

Up-front, the problems: There’s no overworld map. At all. If you, like me, have absolutely no sense of direction in-game or out of it, this will lead to a fair amount of pointless wandering around trying to figure out where the hell you are and where you need to go next. The nature of the game requires a lot of backtracking through areas, so this can develop into quite a sizeable pain in the ass until you learn to memorize smaller landmarks. The best way is often to backtrack using the trail of destruction you leave in your path (the environment is highly interactive), but that doesn’t do much good when the smashables and enemies have had a chance to repop, or when you’ve laid waste to the place and are just trying to find out where the nearest way back to your stronghold is.

Repetition: the game is moderately open-ended (which is to say, extremely compared to the traditional RPG model but not nearly as much as sandboxes like Oblivion), so you can end up wasting a fair amount of capital exploring and sticking your nose (or horde) in places you shouldn’t. Upgrading your gear leads to the same. This leads to some tedium with farming to rebuild your forces, but since I live with Stingray, King of Powerlevelling, I know what this can look like when it’s REALLY bad, and this ain’t really bad at all. If I need one of Stephen King’s longer novels to get through the powerlevelling phase of a Final Fantasy entry, I needed a moderately snappy mystery to get through this.

I’ve also heard some rumors of the game being buggy if you actively try and buck the broader order the game wants you to complete events in, but we never ran into any of these problems despite several such. The fact that NPCs have the same scripted lines and speak up if you just pass close by can get irritating if you’re trying to figure something out in a populated area, but this closes the list of unpleasant or tedious game elements.

The perks: Whoever wrote this game obviously loves the fantasy genre well enough to do a good job satirizing it. It’s not an over-the-top parody, but it’s definitely a twisted take on the usual Tolkienish tropes. The dialogue is witty without being strained, the various races are a few degrees off their usual stereotyped selves and act a good deal more like real villagers/miners/forest snobs than they tend to in books, and the plot actually manages to be a satisfying story. As long as you’re not getting the repetition problems mentioned earlier, it’s actually fun to talk to the NPCs, both in the villages and in your lair. The NPCs acting as player-nudgers also manage to do this largely without being annoying, which is a really nice change of pace, as is the fact that the game tells a story without becoming a movie that has occasional playable bits.

The game is moderately open-ended. There’s a corruption-level system which means you basically have a choice between being something along the lines of Machiavelli’s Prince and being a more traditional totally evil bastard. The consequences of your behavior are mostly in the titles you get, the treasures you get, and what form your spells take; go evil and you’ll get more riches but fewer helpful favors from NPCs, and your spells will trade off very high damage for some blood out of your own hide. Go good, and the opposite will be your reward. So far as I can tell, the game is pretty balanced; this is nice, as in most games of this sort I’ve tried, no matter what the programmers intended there’s usually one choice that’s objectively better than the other. (Case in point, Black and White, where all being good really netted you was extremely passive-aggressive worshippers.) You also get a choice in evil mistresses at one point in the game; one will encourage you to be- not exactly good, but pragmatic- and the other will encourage you to be as bad as possible. There’s also more than one way to accomplish most of your goals, ranging from the right spell for the right occasion to huge hordes to strategic use of a small horde to just powering up all your gear and bulling through on muscle. A word of caution, however: learn to use them all, because that last option helps but isn’t a workable solution in and of itself to the end-game, which is a really shitty time to have to pick up Intermediate Minion Management.

The best part of the game is the minions. They’re flexible (with a few slightly rougher spots, the controls on your horde are godly), endearing, and psychopathic. Sweep them around and they’ll smash whatever can be smashed, kill any non-friendlies in their path, collect items for you, and move obstacles. They come in four different flavors, each with specialties- basic smashy-smashy, ranged attacking, stealth attacks, and healing, and learning to use each kind well takes practice and experimentation but is well worth it. Best of all, they’re self-equipping; as they move over the landscape they’ll loot all the weapons and armor they can, drop worse items for better ones, and sometimes customize their stuff in amusing ways. This gives the minions some individuality; you can tell your “veterans” and when you spawned them by the kind of gear they wind up wearing. Eventually they’ll find better stuff and the horde will get more uniform in appearance, but for a long time it’s almost like having teeny little regiments. Plus, I dare you to resist their enthusiasm for killing sheep.

All in all, highly recommended. Perhaps not a reason to buy the 360 in and of itself, but it’s certainly a worthy entry to the library.

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