GamesRelay

Name: Overlord: Minions

As any fan of the Overlord series will know, the Overlord games offer a fun twist to the fantasy series, with great gameplay, a good background story and its ability to make you smile at some of the witty comments the minions make, the Nintendo DS version - Overlord: Minions was an anticipated handheld game.

Like the previous titles, Overlord: Minions puts you in the role of an all evil Overlord where you control your minions and perform various tasks to ensure that your mighty rule is not broken. In Minions, someone is challenging that evil rule so your senior henchman, Gnarl, dispatches four elite minions to find out who this rival challenger is, it's these four minions that you have to take control throughout the game. While the plot's premise is interesting enough, the main story is rather dull and uninteresting with jokes which aim to be funny but really are not. This of course is one of the Overlord series great strengths, it's disappointing that the game falls flat on its face here as it could have been a welcome respite and really used the Overlord name with pride.

These various tasks which your assigned to doing vary somewhat in that you need to use all four of the minions at your disposal to figure out the puzzles which you encounter. Each minion has its own unique ability, Giblet can push boxes, Blaze uses fireballs, Zap can walk through water and Stench can drop gas bombs, each of these minions you will use together to progress through the levels but these puzzles you encounter are just far too simple. It certainly doesn't help that the areas you traverse are somewhat repetitive in nature bringing the whole experience down with it. One such issue we encountered was during some of the pre-scripted sequences which you come across, if your minions aren't in the correct place and right next to the event then it can sometimes break the encounter not letting you progress, the only way to fix this is to restart the level. While you shouldn't encounter this all the time when it does happen it's extremely frustrating having you wonder if it's even worth the effort to continue playing and restart over.

Controlling these minions is unfortunately another issue which needed to have been resolved before release but was not. You control your minions with the stylus for movement and combat, combat is sometimes difficult since the game doesn't seem to want to track your exact movements with the stylus, more often than not while attacking an enemy you'll find your minions attacking something other than you ordered, it's the same when selecting objects, what should be simple commands turn into frustration with the game which detracts you from what should have been a good experience with easy controls. Navigation is pretty much the same, often you'll need to baby sit your minions as they traverse the level having to save them when they get stuck running into walls, some start to fall behind so you always have to stop and start to keep them together otherwise if you run into a scripted event you have to worry whether it will break the stage and have you restart over.

Combat in Minions also isn't what it should have been, most enemies are just too easy, theirs no real strategy involved, you do have access to various combat abilities and healing but these aren't really needed since the general enemies pose no real challenge. The boss fights however are fun, if you can get past the flaky controls and stupidity of your minions that is, the bosses are slightly more challenging – seeing you use all of your minions to perform certain tasks to kill them, it's not a case of running in and hacking them to bits thankfully which gets all too familiar during the rest of the game.

Graphics wise, the other Overlord games have been very successful in portraying the world in which you are playing, however, Minions falls short of expectation here. The cutscenes are colourful hand-drawn animations but the environments are a crude 3D affair with a limited dark colour palette, bad texturing and low detail. The music while isn't a negative, it's not something that really registers while playing, the sound effects of course do play an integral role, but music can really draw you in to a game, Minions' music just doesn't do that, you'll rarely notice it while playing.

Overlord: Minions is a disappointing game in this otherwise good franchise, the whole game, if you don't encounter any problems during the scripted sequences should last you around ten hours, the lack of any sort of levelling for your minions however removes any need to revisit the levels you have gone through. Overall, the game should have been a feather in the cap of the Overlord series but with its various control issues, disappointing graphics and easy gameplay, it really isn't.