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Destructoid review: Overlord: Raising Hell

8:31 PM on 07.21.2008, Brad Nicholson 20 comments

Destructoid review: Overlord: Raising Hell photo
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A fantasy world without an overly large, stereotypical demon villain would be far too nice, pretty, and sweet. According to Overlord: Raising Hell, fantasy realms need more evil. In fact, the want is so great that the game flips the typical demon antagonist into the main protagonist. The playful mix of satire, commentary, and terrible accents resulting from the flip is enough to delight even the most pragmatic gamer.

Yet, peel back the skin of the nefarious protagonist and charming little minions and what you’re left holding is a mixed bag. While Overlord is a decent romp through a series of missions aimed to make you laugh, think and fill the world with evil, there are also some particularly glaring flaws. These flaws on the PS3 platform are real deal breakers, and unfortunate considering the promise of Overlord: Raising Hell.

Hit the break for the full review.

Overlord: Raising Hell (PlayStation 3)
Developed by 4J Studios
Published by Codemasters

Released on February 15, 2008

When I think about antiheroes, Richard B. Riddick instantly springs to mind. Riddick’s menthol KOOLs, “eyejob,” and knack for going against the moral judgment always get my blood pulsing. My love of the nefarious recently led me to get my hands on 4J Studios’ port of Overlord: Raising Hell. Overlord is a game of controlling minion hordes, abusing civilians, and conquering a fair-minded fantasy universe. Usually, these things are all perfect in my book, but I found myself questioning the real intent of the game. Am I an evil-doer, or am I just an evil looking protagonist? It’s a conflict that really shouldn’t be so readily apparent.

However, my doubts about the quality of evil content were often pushed aside by the strong satirical commentary the game provides. The ever-eager minions give tons of good laughs through both their guttural, but comedic speech, and their tendency to utilize mundane objects such as pumpkins for armor. Beyond the humor, the game’s take on heroics, honor, and shadow is worth anyone’s time. That's not say that I was still not confused when confronted with saving a village as opposed to burning it down.

The game begins with an opening cut-scene that explains the history of the character aptly named the Overlord. Apparently, the Overlord was given some grief by a few heroes and subsequently killed for his actions. It’s no matter, though, because the minions restore him to his previous glory and hand over the reigns to the player. Besides dicing up the Overlord, the heroes also trashed his tower. At this point, the game becomes a rebuilding effort to return the Overlord to what he once was that takes him across the fantasy world. In the process he has to battle gluttonous halflings, elves, dwarves, and a few surprises.

The game is a mix between strategy and action. The Overlord has a few simple actions available to him. There is a simple attack, as well as a basic magic system consisting of a total of four spells. The Overlord can mix it up with the enemies of the land, but it is not suggested. The most important asset to the Overlord is his utilization of minions. Much like a building troops in Starcraft, players can lock onto spawning pools and draw up minions from underground. There are four different kinds of minions, each with specific utilizations. The brown minions are the warrior class, the red are the fire, the blue can swim, and the green are the stealth variant. Each class has its own special abilities outside of just the obvious utilizations as well. The minions are spawned within a certain cap, and special orbs need to be collected to replenish the supplies.

The majority of time, the player utilizes the minions most with the puzzle activities of the game, which almost always consists of clearing debris or carrying an item back to the tower teleport. This is where the game starts failing on the PS3. The controls in Overlord are fickle, and the camera can be highly annoying as it swings and twirls in all the wrong places. There are two ways to control the minion horde. The first of which is simply jamming on a trigger in the direction of the object of interest. Most of the time, the minions will gather up the appropriate object, except the inexactness of the maneuver can lead to several miscues involving the minions going for a stack of plates instead of a treasure bag. Thankfully, there is a lock-on mechanism for easier deployment, but the poor path finding and typically dumb AI can still lead to cataclysmic hiccups. When you’re hitting everything right, the game is really fun, but when the minions start running around like chickens with their heads cut off, the game just starts to break down.

Players can also manually steer the minions with the right analog stick, which is needed in certain sections of the game. This process is usually arduous as the minions don’t respond well to this control scheme or auto-lock on the wrong objects on a consistent basis. Later, when all four sets of minions are available, the game becomes quite frightening to control because of the nature of the gameplay. Most puzzles towards the end of the game require different sets of minions doing different things. While picking which set to give orders to is a simple procedure, steering them around the environment becomes a micromanaging nightmare, especially with enemies present. The nasty frame rate drop that accompanies the PS3 port then aggravates this process even more, and can lead to some very unsatisfactory conclusions.

Overlord: Raising Hell has an online multiplayer component to it, but good luck trying to find someone to play with. I tried unsuccessfully for hours, and it appears that if there is anyone out there willing to play, they aren’t online much. Thankfully, the same three modes offered online are available via split-screen. There isn’t anything especially intriguing about the modes. “Slaughter” pits two Overlords and minions against each other, while “Pillage” is a just a gold collecting exercise. “Survival” is the only interesting mode available, and it is just a cooperative experience to kill enemies that appear on the screen. The technical problems experienced during the single-player are greatly pronounced in split-screen. The game slows to a crawl often, making it practically unplayable.

Visually, Overlord is showing its age. What was once fresh now looks bad by today’s newer standards. I only bring this up because it looks like the game was just perfectly ported from the 360 version. If there was anything updated or detailed more thoroughly, my eyes missed it. Even though the visuals are a bit wonky, the music, voice acting, and sound effects still suffice.

The new content available in this expansion version of Overlord is only new missions and an advanced forge. The forge is certainly an improvement over the last version, as it allows players greater customization of armor and weapons. The big change is the addition of new missions and story elements. The content doesn’t provide anything amazing to the original game. In fact, the new stuff is really irrelevant if you already did not enjoy Overlord or its gameplay, which is understandable considering how technically hindered this version of the game is.

When everything is accounted for, Overlord: Raising Hell is an occasionally fun game that is rarely engaging, but always funny. The flair of the game has a tendency to overshadow the majority of its problems, and that’s the big catch. Overlord: Raising Hell is special in regards to its satire, but is an inferior game on the PS3 platform. If the game didn’t chug like a locomotive or if minions were easier to control then I could see myself really enjoying the experience. The same goes for the expansion content. It’s great to have these new elements, but it’s hard to really bite into it when the game performs so poorly.

Score - 6.0 (I can see some people that really dig the humor enjoying this game immensely. At the same rate, the game feels old and controls miserably. Definitely rent if you never played the previous Overlord game before.)


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rbrooks's Avatar
rbrooks at 07/21/2008 21:00
neither i can rent it and beat it easy.
Purringturtle's Avatar
Purringturtle at 07/21/2008 21:21
I am just so glad I am not the only person on the planet who wants to beat the controller against the heads of the little beasties. I want to like this game so badly... but I just can't and its all the controls.
liam2015's Avatar
liam2015 at 07/21/2008 21:31
I'm sure it's worth getting for free. I mean, the demo was pretty fun.
DaedHead8's Avatar
DaedHead8 at 07/21/2008 22:39
I've been meaning to pick this up for the 360. Good review.
mix's Avatar
mix at 07/21/2008 22:47
Sounds like the rating I was expecting it to get after I played the demo.

@ Heretic

I would grab this for $20 for sure.
hpv's Avatar
hpv at 07/22/2008 01:13
Heretic: Neither. I might have bought it for $10 on PSN though.
greeneggsnsam's Avatar
greeneggsnsam at 07/22/2008 01:18
Winning it on Dtoid is better than renting it. I played the demo, too- it was okay.
Im OK's Avatar
Im OK at 07/22/2008 03:21
I downloaded the Raising Hell expansion a while back and... ...haven't touched it at all yet. Hmm, maybe I should get around to playing that some day. Too much other stuff.

Anyway, I bought the original Overlord used for the 360 back in November and thought it was pretty cool, kind of like Fable Lite + Pikmin or something. It wasn't the best game ever or anything, but it was neat enough for what I paid for it. I didn't really have any problems with it, at least not to such a big extent that the review makes them out to be. I had no problem with the controls after a slight initial learning curve.

Visually, Overlord is showing its age. What was once fresh now looks bad by today’s newer standards.

This, right here, is a big part of what I think is wrong with gamers and gaming today, generally speaking, and has been for quite a long time now. This game is barely a year old. Just because a game doesn't have super-duper ultra mega whiz-bang cutting edge state of the art up to the second graphics doesn't mean it "looks bad". Sheesh.
Timmeh's Avatar
Timmeh at 07/22/2008 05:33
I agree with Im Ok. Comments about the framerate (which I seem to have been spared from by getting it on the PC) are perfectly valid, but complaining about it not using all the latest bells and whistles is rubbish. The game doesn't look that bad and the art direction I thought was pretty solid.

By today's standards all those 'classics' everone loves so much look like absolute shit, should we start commenting on that? "I was playing Diablo the otehr day and noticed there wasn't any bump-mapping or High Dynamic Range lighting, what a piece of shit".

But yes, the game is entertaining and fun, despite it's broken control scheme (camera didn't seem to bad with keyboard/mouse).

Oh and I thought you were resurrected to replace the old Overlord after his demise, not brought back after being (re?)killed by some heroes.
ThisYearsPink's Avatar
ThisYearsPink at 07/22/2008 08:12
@Im OK and Timmeh: While it may be unfair to judge the game based on the slightly outdated visuals, it is worth pointing out in a review...just so people know what to expect if they decide to pick it up. Plus, I don't know if you read the next sentence or not:

I only bring this up because it looks like the game was just perfectly ported from the 360 version.

I mean, go back to what Heretic pointed out. The PS3 version is 40 more dollars. It's clearly important that the reviewer discuss the visuals in the way that he did for the reason that he did.
king3vbo's Avatar
king3vbo at 07/22/2008 10:32
I have the 360 version, and I think I'll stick with it
Anus Mcphanus's Avatar
Anus Mcphanus at 07/22/2008 10:37
Good thing I got it for free then XD
Timmeh's Avatar
Timmeh at 07/22/2008 15:38
@ThisYearsPink

You're correct really considering that it is full price, I don't think it said that anywhere in the review though.

I think though, that the issue lies more with the pricing than the presentation. Full retail price is far too much to ask for a title that has been out a while on another platform regardless of quality.
Im OK's Avatar
Im OK at 07/22/2008 20:46
@ThisYearsPink

My issue wasn't about the comparison to it looking like a year old 360 game. That's perfectly valid and justified for a review. My complaint is about the assertion that it "looks bad" because it looks like a year old 360 game. The wording just didn't sit well with me I guess, since I did and still do think Overlord has pretty nice graphics, for what it's worth. *shrug* I've seen far more anti-fanboyish examples* of this lately, so I guess it was a case of straw + camel's back here. (Though, honestly, this particular camel's back had already been broken for a loooong time now.)

Given that this is Overlord + the expansion pack and not just vanilla Overlord, I don't think an increased price point is entirely unreasonable. If it were just the original Overlord that was selling for full price, yeah, it would be retarded. But consider that if you bought the $20 Overlord in the first post, you'd still have to pay another $10 or so to get the expansion for 360 if you wanted it. Well, granted, that's still cheaper than the full-price PS3 version andI personally wouldn't pay that much for it, if I had access to the other versions, but I wouldn't call someone else a retard for doing so. It's really not that horrible of a game.

* - For instance, in one of the threads on Kotaku about Castlevania Judgment someone actually said something like: "It looks like Soul Calibur. Yuck." I about fell out of my chair, it was such a ridiculous statement. In other words, this guy was using Soul Calibur as an insult somehow, in much the same way that someone else used Superman64 when talking about MK vs DC (another statement I found ludicrous, but for different reasons). If anything, Castlevania Judgment should feel honored to be compared to Soul Calibur, imo.
MechaMonkey's Avatar
MechaMonkey at 07/22/2008 22:58
One would imagine that game testers would have picked up on the dismal controls and inform the development team about them. Why would you let something so basic and yet so integral to the game experience ruin what could otherwise be a solid and entertaining game?
Timmeh's Avatar
Timmeh at 07/23/2008 03:27
@Mechamonkey

"Hey, dude, these controls for your game suck. You REALLY need to go back and rework them"

"We've sent the master for pressing and it's going to retail next month"

"Oh, never mind then"

Simple fact is, there seems to be barely any substantial testing goes on these days. Look at the number of broken cameras or terrible UIs we get these days. The UI in particular is something that could easily be fixed, but why go back into development when the game is 'finished'?
mr moustache's Avatar
mr moustache at 08/05/2008 15:07
test comment
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