by Elton Gahr

Created on: September 02, 2009   Last Updated: January 15, 2012

In Overlord II, you get to play the evil character with a hoard of evil minions. This leads to a game that plays a little like a hack and slash and a little like a strategy game as you can use you minions as foot soldiers while you stand behind or you can rush into battle yourself.

The game begins with you as a child, but you play this for only a few minutes as it shows you how to do the various things that are needed to play the game. I don't fully understand why every game feels the need to force people through tutorials when it isn't really necessary but at least in Overlord II it is quick and mixed with a quite a lot of humor.

The humor is one of the best things about Overlord II. Just like in Overload, the minions themselves are quite funny, and nearly every enemy you fight is a strange and humorous perversion of what you might expect. It is generally pretty funny and it makes you feel considerably better about sending your minions into slaughter them.

There are only a handful of true advances over Overlord. The first of the advances is the ability for your minions to get levels. This is both good and bad. Part of the fun of minions is the ability to allow them to be slaughtered in battles but by giving them real stats it is more difficult to simply use them. I don't know if I like this or not.

There are four types of minions and this should add a considerable amount of strategy but since the browns are the only ones who can truly stand up in a fight and most of the time simply rushing in with a hoard of browns can solve the problem. This makes the game less strategic than it should be. Also problematic is that it is more difficult to find the life orbs that allow you to summon minions is problematic, and going back to the areas can help some but it isn't all that much fun to wander through mostly empty levels in search of orbs.

If you liked Overlord then you will like Overlord II, but there is nothing here that will convince someone who wasn't a fan of the first game to become a fan of this one otherwise you'll find it a game that is about average.

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