Comments on: Over and Over: Overlord II Impressions

By: TRS-80

TRS-80 — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:57:15 +0000

I have nothing to say about Overlord, just that the persuadatron is one of my favorite weapons ever.

By: LewieP

LewieP — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:06:40 +0000

You can get it for just shy of £16 here. Pretty great price for a new game.

By: Frosty840

Frosty840 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:26:16 +0000

Also, the thing that galled me the most about the difference between the two games came near the end of Overlord 2, when I ran across a field to kill some archers. Suddenly I’d lose eight or ten minions for no real reason that I could see. I killed the archers easily enough, but I was unhappy with and confused by the sudden and bizarre deaths of my minions, so I kept reloading the section time after time to work out what the hell was happening.
Eventually I realised that fire arrows from the archers were setting fire to areas of the field, killing my minions. There’s no mention anywhere in the whole of Overlord 2 that long grass and fire arrows present a particular problem; there isn’t, in fact, another place in the game, so far as I noticed, where enemy archers can fire at you while you’re in long grass.

Flash forward about four hours, and I’m playing the opening level of Overlord. I get my first magic spell, the fireball spell, and I find a bunch of halflings sleeping in a field and the game specifically tells me to set fire to the field, evilly burning all the halflings to death as the whole field catches fire.

That’s the sort of thing that’s missing from Overlord 2, and despite the fact that everyone in Overlord 1 is treating me like the bloody Hero, it’s Overlord 1 that seems to get things right.

By: MonkeyMonster

MonkeyMonster — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:20:22 +0000

Mouse + kb is fine for me too – I remapped a couple but slightly let down they don’t auto update the loading page hints to show this… Valve has a lot to answer for nice touches.
Going for destruction all the way first time round… I’m guessing the bonus for getting all 100 people will be good enough that if you had it too early would make other things easier so added in (to me) logical barriers that require you having got the greens back to finish it off.
Finding it as amusing as the first but blatantly being more evil this time around. Only annoyance really is when you mind meld into a red minion you can’t throw fireballs.

By: Subject 706

Subject 706 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:13:33 +0000

Liked the first one, found mouse + kb controls to be perfectly ok (maybe my fingers are just dexterous to the extreme). Bought the second one solely for the seal clubbing of course.

By: Frosty840

Frosty840 — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:13:17 +0000

I’ve just finished going through Ol2 and have gone back to Ol1 (where the lack of a mini-map is ruining my life), and I have to say that these two games continue the rather annoying trend in modern sequels to take a simple game (Overlord) and then streamline it to the edge of nonexistence (Overlord 2).

Ol1 featured weak minions, low minion counts for a lot of the game, and the late arrival of blue minions. The best counter to this would have been the earlier arrival of blue minions, meaning that you’d need to keep a close eye on your minions, keeping the more experienced minions alive with blue revivals, etc. What they did instead was to make the minions very strong indeed, to the point where blues and greens are almost unnecessary; minions don’t die often enough to make blue revivers worth keeping around and browns now have so much health that it’s far simpler to just have them wade in than it is to set up an ambush with the greens.
The three spells your overlord has are all crap. Health is easy to come by, so there’s little point in eating minions, and minions are powerful enough by themselves that none of the extra-damage spells have any meaningful effect.

I think the thing that sums up the problem with Overlord 2 for me most is the fight with the troll. Trolls are a relatively common enemy in Overlord; I’d fought two by the time I rescued the red minions, they’re powerful, but not unmanageable. In Ol2, there is but a single troll, stuck in a big room at the end of a narrow corridor. The only sensible way to beat him is to stick a bunch of red minions at the end of the corridor, and have them pelt him with fireballs for FOREVER until he dies.
I really, really wanted to distract him with browns, surprise him with the greens’ leap attacks and only use the reds to wear him down, but it’s just not possible to do that.
All of the subtlety has been sucked out of the game.

The combat in Ol2 is generally poor, to be honest. Most fights feature “roman legion”-type enemies, who must be defeated by working out the puzzle that allows you to kill their commanding officer, at which point the mini-legion panics and can be easily killed.

The extra graphical prettiness can’t make up for the gutting of what little complexity the original game had.

By: pzykozis

pzykozis — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:29:53 +0000

It’s a shame really It improves on somethings yet, becomes far more annoying in others, green spiders walking on walls with dodgy sweeping (fair enough I’m talking about 360 controller) leads to one of the most frustrating experiences in a game yet.

Why wont you just walk around the walls my little goblins… WHY?!

By: pignoli

pignoli — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 08:25:43 +0000

Right, I’m going to dig out the Gamecube and play Pikmin until Bullfrog magically reform and make Dungeon Keeper 3.

By: JKjoker

JKjoker — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:01:20 +0000

@much2much: there is “almost isometric” style third person and “over the shoulder” style third person but most of the time the camera does whatever it wants

By: much2much

much2much — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:40:34 +0000

I played the demo and thought it was funny.

Is there anyway to switch it to 1st person mode though? 3rd person gives me a headache.

By: MD

MD — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:09:00 +0000

I was going to mock you for complaining about your 30°C ‘heatwave’, but honestly I’m just jealous. England has officially been added to my list of places to flee to when global warming renders my homeland uninhabitable.

By: JKjoker

JKjoker — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:30:32 +0000

what happened with the Jester is weird, by giving him longer quotes and lines they killed him, i loved hearing the funny titles he gave you in O1 he never needed any more character development

i barely remember the mistresses doing or saying anything in O1 tho