Puzzles aren’t taxing, rarely involving much more than using the correct minion type with the correct object. The browns are your cannon fodder brawlers, but your reds can chuck fireballs and (we think, it’s hard to tell for sure) inhale away fire from burning barricades. Blues are medics and swimmers, while greens turn invisible when standing still and can saunter through toxic fumes. Every minion type has its own unique mount too, which furthers the variation in puzzles: browns riding wolves can leap short gaps to reach switches. Greens on their giant spiders can crawl up walls to unlock doors. That sort of thing.

You’ll undoubtedly become attached to at least one of the little fellas, as soon as one of them finds a hat or something to mark him out as an individual. For this reason, minions can be brought back from the dead, at the cost of some of your newbies. Every minion’s got a name this time around, and can level up independently of you. Brilliantly, they’ll earn titles depending on their combat history – from lowly epitaphs like New Born, to the nobler Centurion Crusher. They’ll have all of the weapons they died with too, so while visits to the graveyard aren’t a necessity, they’re an alluring option for a caring Overlord.

For a simple combination of some basic ideas, Overlord II’s an incredibly fun game. The depth is obscured behind some console-minded interfaces – running around your tower to access what are essentially different menu screens is a pain – but everything’s delivered with great pace and an engaging sense of progression.

Finally, the PC version seems to lack many of the technological glitches that devastate the console version (hence the difference in scores). So while this self-proclaimed “evil simulator” (that’s actually the genre it gets listed under in Vista) doesn’t feature that horrible thing we made you think of in the first paragraph, its brand of guiltless comic villainy is probably more entertaining than “true” evil could ever be. Just look at Kim Jong-il - that guy’s never smiling.

Jul 1, 2009