- Retarded Achievement Syndrome - When a game that has a 0% probability of staying popular longer than 6 seconds on xbox live has achievements that try to force people to play it’s multi player!
- Repetitive Game play - I enjoy going to work 5 days a week looking and doing the same thing every day. Not! I don’t enjoy doing the same in my video games either.
- Very Very Messy Game Design - When a games core mechanics feels like it was inspired by my desk and room, which mind you, are usually very very messy.
- I need glue - To hold one or more button down that I constantly need to press to play this game, usually for an action that through better user interface design could have been utilized differently.
- Horrible Targeting System - I base all targeting system comparisons with GTA3. If a game’s targeting system is worse than that game, then it’s pretty bad and deserves to lose a life.
I rented this game. I have a soft spot for games that either involve dungeons, fantasy type role playing, or look like it may be some sort of RTS or Minion type game play. When getting these types of games, I often explore the multi player options a little bit early just to check and see how many people are playing at any given time. Warcraft 3 has been out for like a bazillion years, as well as Starcraft, and there are always tons of people ready to play in most of the game types available. So when I checked to see overlord was released last year some time, I expected at least 10 people playing some type of multi player. I was wrong of course.
For you achievement whores out there. This is bad news seing around 100-150 points that you can get revolve around playing multi player games. Some have you needing to play at least 50 games, of each type of match, which will just be impossible for you unless you know someone else with the game that has the time to play 150 matches with you just so you can get said achievement.
That being said, I’m only like 3 hours into this game. The core ideas in this game are nice. You control an overlord to do evil across the land. In doing so you gain control of minions who pretty much run around and kill and destroy anything you tell them to. What is annoying about this game already is that you pretty much just have to press the R button to get them to do everything. You just hold it down… forever it seems… and they run around and kill what you look at. Sure, there is a targeting system, which is pretty horrible, but until later parts of the game holding down R does it until you gain new minions to control.
As you unlock new minions you gain access to new abilities and uses for them. There are fire minions who pretty much control all things fire. So if an object you need is on the other side of fire you can pretty much imagine what you need to do next. Then there are water minions. And green ones, of which I haven’t unlocked yet, but I can imagine have something to do with plants or wind. This game is pretty much pikmin, but with worse controls, all tied into a Medieval hack-and-slash. Promising at first but lets you down really early. Only hardcore players are going to want to play this game in it’s entirety. It’s already down to 5 lives, which is enough for me to quit playing at any time. The only bonus this game gets to get me to keep playing it is that..well, i rented it, so I might as well try to get as far as I can get in just a few days.
The only really positive thing that I can say about this game so far is that the dialog is witty. It keeps me entertained and i often stop playing just to hear what some of the people have to say.