Overlord 2 Review Continued

22 Jun 2009 at 13:13:53 by Tim McDonald
Systems used to review this title: (360)

Other changes aren't quite so welcome. The camera was a perennial pain in the ass in the first game, mostly because the right analogue stick is used to sweep and direct your Minions, and the solution here is neither one nor the other. Now, the right analogue stick rotates the camera if you push it left or right. If you press it forward, it goes into “sweep” mode, which, as before, uses the stick to move all of the selected Minions. Problems come into play when you try to turn the camera to see what's shooting at you, only to discover that the game thinks you're still trying to move Minions, usually resulting in you charging them into the wall with the camera focused on them. It happens the other way around, too – you try to move Minions but didn't sweep forward enough, so your subsequent stick movements send the camera spinning uselessly around you. Obviously, these moments aren't a problem when it's not urgent, but when you're in the middle of combat and you really need to move your Red Minions onto a hill so that they can bombard the enemy troops with fire, it's a lot harder to make sure you've got the requisite movements spot on.

The other major change is something that should've been in the first game from the off: a minimap. While you'll still do a lot of backtracking and wandering around looking for the path to the next objective, the minimap minimises these problems significantly. Hurray for this, at least.

No hurray for the moments when the game forgets that it's an RTS/puzzle game hybrid and attempts to be something else. One mercifully brief section sees you controlling a boat as you attempt to chase down and board another, which is faster than you, while respawning mermaids mean you have to stop the boat to deal with them every twenty seconds. Another bit has you trying to break a heavily fortified enemy line while under fire from catapults that require constant repositioning of Minions, and can pretty much kill you in a single hit. With the occasionally quirky Minion controls, this is a nightmare, and the checkpoint before this particular section is a long time back – which is another oddity, as some checkpoints are a hell of a lot closer together than others.

In the end, though, the gameplay wins out. There are occasional irritants in the form of checkpointing, or sections involving boats or catapults (the latter of which can be forgiven, somewhat, for letting you use it immediately afterwards) but what you have is a devilishly funny and deceptively clever RTS/puzzle game. Working out just how to break through an Empire formation without taking losses is a treat. Electrocuting fleeing villagers is a bigger one. But the real star of the show, as ever, is the writing, and there's so much more of it. Gnarl, your advisor, is as evil as ever, and now he contends with various Mistresses, all of whom argue and banter amongst themselves. And then there are the hippy elves, the screams of joy when your Minions discover mounts for the first time (“Spideeeey! Giddyup!”) or when you just hold down the right trigger and watch them run amok. And then, there's the yeti. Oh, the yeti.

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