Overlord: Dark Legend Comments by Ellie Gibson

So it's basically Medieval Pikmin?

*Has never played an Overlord game*

I was thinking the same thing. Greens, browns, blues..

*me neither*

An Ellie article excellent, but it's about a game I really want to be good... hmmm. The article starts... wait, positive? Then it continues to be positive... where is the comedy sarcasm I came here for? But then I do want this to be good...

So now I've finished the article feeling really positive about Overlord and yet very confused... surely Ellie is only allowed to touch really crappy games?

@Rirekon - that was a while ago.

If you've not played an OL game it is sort of like Pikmin, crossed with Fable.
It's very good as well BTW. The original game had some great RPG/upgrade elements to it that made it compelling to play.

"If the finished version of Dark Legend turns out to have enough depth and a decent difficulty curve, Wii owners could have another reason to be cheerful."

I had fun with the original, but when it ramped up the difficulty near the end, it became frustrating. The problem is that when you wander into a fight for the first time, you don't have time to scope out where you should place your minions, and you've already had to decide how many of each type of minion to bring along. So you're probably going to have to repeat the more challenging fights 2 or 3 times. That's ok, but each time you die, you lose those minions, so you find yourself repeatedly returning to earlier areas just to harvest more.

So it seemed like the original was much better suited to rampaging through areas rather than strategic battles (although they were great when you finally got it right).

Three cheers for games that let you both skip and pause cutscenes! :)

The Pikmin comparison that gets mentioned a lot is interesting but not quite accurate: the Overlord games are action adventure / light RPGs... you're hitting stuff with the player character, casting spells, looting cash, forging new armour, weapons, upgrades etc.

Pikmin is much more of a strategy / puzzle game that uses a player character to hold it all together.

I'll pick it up if later levels are challenging enough. I loved the Raising Hell expansion which had the hardest and most enjoyable levels in the whole original game, if this is too simple I won't bother. And I think the gps style map is a bad idea, exploration is part of the fun.

"Typical: you wait all decade for a decent Wii game and three turn up at once."

What a thoroughly stupid comment. I know the writer was probably being facetious, but it annoys me when that nonsense is propagated. One glance at any list of Wii games shows that not only are there plenty of good-to-outstanding games (with far more worthwhile third-party efforts than the GameCube or N64 could ever dream of), but the list offers a far more diverse range of experiences than either of the other two consoles. Yes, there's a surfeit of rubbish there too and not many mainstream genre games, but for anyone looking to try something different, new and fun then the Wii has plenty to offer. But then Eurogamer did give Deadly Creatures a 4/10, so I think it's fairly obvious where they stand on the Wii front.