Game Overview
Overlord is the breath of fresh air we needed on the 360, for a long time now we have been engrossed in first person shooters, racing and sports sims, maybe with the exception of 2 or 3 games there hasn't really been a great deal else worth playing, that is until now!

We'll admit, when Codemasters asked us about running a review for Overlord, we took one look at the screenshots and thought "looks interesting but will probably end up buried under the usual games after a week or two, well, thanks to Overlord, we have been taught a very important lesson on life, never, EVER, judge a book by its cover! We couldn't be more wrong!

Overlord is different, its quite unique, there are plenty of games that have come and gone that make you choose between being good, and being evil, but there hasn't been many (we can only think of one!) that spur you on to be really evil rather than just evil! Sounds cool already doesn't it!

The idea behind the game is to be lazy, yep, lazy........the less work you do the better. You play the part of the Overlord, a character that actually is pretty pointless in the whole scheme of things, doesn't say anything and when he runs he looks like he has had a broom stuck where the sun don't shine! He controls "Minions", minions do all the work, looting and killing mainly! Whatever you tell them to do, they'll do.

The minions come in four colours, you start out with the Browns, these guys are the fighters, they'll kill virtually anything and are great looters smashing up houses and finding as much gold and weapons as possible. You'll need to find and retrieve the hives for the three remaining coloured minions, Red are the fire minion, immune to fire, aren't great fighters but throw deadly fireballs to kill advancing enemies. Next you have the Green minions, these guys are animals! Immune to poisoness gases and great at ambushing, they'll jump on the backs of Trolls and other larger enemies and rip them to shreds. Last but not least are the Blues, the wimps of the minions, they are the only type of minion that can swim they possess some magical powers and they can heal dead minions, but don't send them into a scrap because they won't come back!

Controlling the Minions once you have all four colours can be a little complicated at times and you'll occasionally cancel a command by accident and then get ripped to shreds by your enemy. Gameplay is fairly consistent throughout the game requiring you to control the minion’s actions rather than your own although you may have to wield your axe once in a while to lend a helping hand.

Different parts of the game require different techniques when using your Minions, sometimes you'll need to use the greens to run ahead and dispose of poisoness gases or your blues will need to run through some water in order to pick up an item but to do so they must run through a load of enemies, with the blues being rubbish fighters they'll just get wiped out so you have to work out how to kill these enemies so the blues can go and collect the item. None of the puzzles are that brain taxing in all honesty and won't cause you to many headaches but they do keep on coming and coming so you'll never be short of something to do.

Graphically the game looks good, some nice lighting effect here and there and in general the levels look pretty good although a few of the maps can be quite dark and some of the camera angles can sometimes disguise a path you need to take which will leave you running about for ages trying to work out what to do next, which can be a little frustrating.

Where we thought this game would fall down is online, the way the single player mode plays, it gives the impression that this should really be a single player game only however Codemasters have done an excellent job at converting it over to Xbox Live. Survival being the best pick, this is where you team up with a mate and use minions to last as long as possible and fighting off wave after wave of enemies then obviously there are battles where you are required to kill your opponent and their minions or alternatively steel as much gold in a certain amount of time. Its good fun we can assure you of that.

Our Conclusions
Replay ability won't be all that great with the single player unless you want to mop up the extra achievements. It’s a solid game with a few issues here and there but nothing all that major. Online is good fun although you'll probably need to convince a mate to buy the game as there is a lack of people playing this online as it is only 2 players. Other than that not a bad turnout and definitely not what we were expecting.

Overall Score: 8/10

Thanks to all the guys at Codemasters!