Overlord II Review

Expert Marauders

That's not all for tactics; as you advance in the game, you'll find you can cast spells on the villagers and use them as human shields to take damage from your foes and prevent losing members of your faithful minions. Whether you take control of the villagers or kill them is up to you. Players who decide to destroy and kill everything in their path will become stronger in the area of destruction, while players who decide to manipulate will become better at controlling the poor suckers, providing an element of differentiation in play style.

Your minions also gain rank and armour as they become more experienced at marauding through the happy world and its delightful inhabitants. Armour and other loot can be collected by smashing up the crates and ornaments that litter that game world. This feature provides you incentive to play well, keep your minions alive and nurture them into gobby little veterans of mayhem.

There are several points throughout the game where you can head back to the Netherworld and perform various evil administrative duties. You can check up on your minion’s quarters, sit on your throne and sacrifice low level minions to revive your deceased captains, though it will cost many more of the former to bring the latter back to life.

Graphics and Options

The first time you cast your glowing yellow eyes on the game world, it looks like a cross between The Nightmare Before Christmas and Bullfrog's classic RTS Dungeon Keeper. Overlord II is a pretty game and while the art style is reminiscent of Overlord: Raising Hell, the graphics have been stepped up a notch. The lighting effects of spells and such are softer, there are fewer jaggies and the textures are more intricately drawn.

This is a console port though, so it's not surprising to see that sharply coloured and over-exposed edginess that's so common in console games, both because consoles struggle with true dynamic lighting compared to the PC, and because console games' graphics are created to be high impact.


The first time the game starts it provides you with options to choose the resolution and graphics pre-sets (medium, low or high). Once this is done, you’re greeted with an opening screen that makes sure your monitor can run the resolution that the game is set to. At the top of the window that asks you if it’s OK the keep the current resolution is a small goblin creature, bending over and slapping his arse at you. Awesome.

Like most self respecting PC gamers, we went straight for the display options menu to find further graphics settings to tinker with before starting to. There aren't any more graphics settings to play with other than those provided by the screen the first time you fire up the game.
The only remaining options to click are Audio, Display (which contains options such as gamma control and refresh rate) and Game. Annoyingly, there's no option to get out of the options menu. Backspace, escape nor any other key could get us out so we had to literally restart the game to exit the options menu. It should be said though that this may have been a bug with our pre-release review sample.