The general beauty of Overlord is the ability to command waves of Goblin-like creatures out to execute your will upon the world. An often comedic world where the heroes have become villains, in fact. This June saw the release of not only a sequel, but a Wii variation and, passing under the radar of most, a Nintendo DS spin-off. While the console titles all carry the same idea of throwing servants at a problem until it solves itself, the DS version instead breaks down into just four minions willing to do your bidding.

Overlord Minions takes place after the first game, as suddenly some group of villains known as the Kindred are trying their best to take over your claimed territory. The situation calls for more subtlety than usual, so instead of building an army you are controlling a sort of special operations team consisting of one of each color of goblin. The general game design follows a similar style to The Lost Vikings on the Super Nintendo, back when Blizzard actually made games for consoles.

It can easily be assumed that a portable spin-off of a franchise won’t have the same care put into the story and writing as the console counter-parts, but Minions manages to find a weird little nook to sit itself. Rhianna Pratchett wrote the DS title just as she had the console games, allowing the vocabulary and wording to be as intelligent as expected. What is missing is the sense of humor. The four minions look and speak as if they are from the Saturday Morning Cartoon pitch to Cartoon Network, and are about as funny as a rerun of Muppet Babies. In addition, the animated story sequences lack any sense of real effort. They go back and forth between the same one or two still frames per character as the dialogue displays, and on occasion a very poor animation of a cut-out moving from one side of the screen to the other plays. You’ll find much better work put into an amateur cartoon on Newgrounds.

Of course, we’re talking about a video game here. It’s not unheard of to forgive a poor and boring story to focus on the gameplay, especially if the developers were gracious enough to allow you to skip the cut-scenes. Overlord Minions is full of plenty of good ideas and concepts of game design, providing each character with their own valuable strengths and weaknesses. While the levels are rather bland at the start, they later become more interesting and full of a lot of puzzles specializing in each of the character’s skills. It takes some time, but the majority of the game tends to tickle the brain enough to provide amusing and delightful problem solving in order to complete the game.

Unfortunately, good ideas and some clever level design isn’t enough to save a game from itself. The only form of input allowed is the stylus and touch screen. In order to keep controls simple, interacting with an object is as simple as drawing a slash through it. This will tell your minion(s) to pick up an object, attack an enemy or some other form of interaction. Simply pressing a point on the screen will cause the Minions to walk where you wish. Sounds simple enough, yet it causes so many frustrations. Various interactive objects will become bundled together, causing a minion to approach and try to use an object, button, spawn pit or anything else when you do not wish them to. An attempt to draw a slash through something being confused for walking towards it happens frequently and in the most unfortunate of situations. Each level will find you gritting your teeth as you just want to shout into the DS how stupid it is for walking to the spawn pit instead of pushing a button.

The problems only become more exacerbated as combat is thrown into the mix. In a game featuring various characters with various skills, there is no strategy for any of the foes except to make sure you are using Brown or Green in the front lines. Using Blue or Red is a sure way for them to die. Trying to perform guerrilla strikes by slashing once, stepping away and then slashing again are met with failure. The reaction time is simply too slow. In the end the best option is to slash over an enemy with the stylus as fast as you can to perform more attacks off.

There are charge meters for each minion, and once they have reached maximum capacity that minion can perform a special attack. These abilities would normally prove valuable in plotting an attack effectively, only getting any of the little maggots to understand what you’re telling them to do proves more challenging than it ought to be. All you have to do is double-tap on the character you want to perform a special ability with the stylus, but most often they’ll just stand there doing nothing. It registers as a movement command instead, meaning they even stop attacking and sit there absorbing damage dealt by your foes. The only fun battles are the bosses that manage to be more puzzle based than combat based, but those only make up half of the game.

Despite these flaws in controls, the game isn’t really difficult at all. Just frustrating. As long as you can keep one minion alive, you can backtrack to a spawn pit and revive your allies. The only harm done is your score at the end takes a point off per respawn, but your end-level score provides no benefit anyway. It’s just a number attached to the end of the level with no reward.

The greatest shame of all is that the copyright information suggests this game was labeled “complete” back in 2008. That means there was more than half a year that this title could have been polished to perform better, but for some reason the developers figured it was fine enough as is and shoved it off to the side until the console counterparts were ready for retail. Some of the puzzle elements of the game suggest that there was a good designer on the development team, but sheer laziness kept the experience from being as enjoyable as it could have been. Simply allowing the player to use the directional-pad and face buttons would have improved the gameplay significantly.

Of course, with or without the control issues and boring combat, Overlord Minions provides no significant ideas or elements of gameplay into the mix. It is a completely passable experience with no reason to play it. That is, unless you really are that much of a die hard Overlord fan, but you’d have to be frighteningly serious about your fanaticism to get your money’s worth out of this handheld cash-in attempt.

Comment on this article