How many of you even knew there was an Overlord 2 demo out there? It seemingly sneaked it's way onto the Marketplace last night, still tucked away in the new arrivals on the demo page. You might want to note this is the same demo from E3, but at least now all of us can play it. From what I've heard and seen, Overlord II looks and plays very similar to the original, which I'm all for. Overlord is a personal gem in action-adventure games for this generation. The battle scheme was fun to play with, the quests weren't too tedious and there was enough humour to make annihilating small towns seem a little less gruesome. So does the demo stack up to the expectation?

For those that didn't play the original game, Overlord is an action-adventure, setting you as the Overlord of evil. No true Overlord does work themself, so you have minions who will attack, steal and die for you. It's a weird mix between Zelda and Pikmin, but it's simple enough to control that it never feels overwhelming. You explore the world, complete quests and even have some moral choices to make that alter your Overlord tower's appearance.

As for the demo itself, it starts out with an introduction to the story, following up from the end of Raising Hell and showing the minions flocking around their new, young and frozen Overlord in an icy cavern. The boy is broken from the ice, and raised to be all kinds of evil. I'm sure his dad would be proud. Now a fully-grown man, the new Overlord must reclaim the land his father once owned, now ruled over by the Romanesque-style Empire.

The first thing struck me is how beautiful the opening level looks. The original has it's flaws, and one of my major complaints was the lack of diversity in levels. Starting out in a cool ice cave inspires some creativity in that department, and it does look very pretty. The level design is much like the first game, split into sections where you can walk and sections where you can't (But your minions can), but it's still fun to wander around and check out the scenery. At the end of the demo (Or glorified tutorial, like I was expecting anything less), it showcases a few more of the levels, and they really do stand out against the countryside setting from before.

The tutorial itself isn't too bad, teaching you the basics like maneuvering your minions, summoning and gathering lifeforce, and even ends with a quick and easy boss fight. Like before you can upgrade your minions by scavenging for weapons and gold, but now they can tame beasts to ride on. The only one you see in the demo are wolves which make your minions much faster, but the general idea is promising and should be great to see what they do with it later in the game. After clubbing some seals to death for our precious lifeforce (Animals rights should have a field day with that one), we follow an ogre around the level, killing hunters until we get to face him ourself. He's easy enough, but Overlord does have some imaginative boss fights and this is only a tutorial.

The game itself plays almost identically to the original. There's now an option to free-roam the camera by holding LB and moving the right stick, and thankfully they've included a mini-map in the bottom-left corner which displays the area and objectives. The lack of a map was a huge mistake in the first game, so it's nice to see Codemasters learning from it. Other than that it felt exactly the same to me. You can run around holding LT and let the minions do the work, you can herd them around yourself with the right stick, or you can get upclose and personal, bash some hunter's heads in and magic blast anyone who gets in your way.

Overall it seems decent enough, even if the demo is ridiculously easy. It's a nice introduction for new players and a complete tease for fans of the first, but it does a good job of showing off the basics for what you'll be doing throughout the game.