After a slight hiatus, here we are again. Of course, by “slight” I mean almost two years and by “here” I mean this dusty old corner of the internet. In two years have I knocked out my backlog and suddenly found myself with nothing to say? Absolutely not! During that time, though, I did play some pretty fantastic games. God of War (PS4) was a great return to form and probably my favorite game of last year. Spider-Man (PS4) was equally great and really scratched that “you want to play a Batman Arkham game, but there isn’t a new one to play” itch. That may sound like a knock, but I consider it a compliment and I am excited to see where that franchise goes next while I wait for Rocksteady or WB Montreal to stick their head out of the cave and say, “Batman is coming.” In the not-so-new category I finally played 3D Dot Game Heroes (PS3) and found that I really enjoyed the mashup of Dragon Warrior and Legend of Zelda with a lot of humor and nods thrown in to old school RPGs. I had a pretty productive two years but let us now turn towards more recent times of playing less recent games.
I finally got my hands-on Overlord 2 (360) and thankfully it was backwards compatible on Xbox One, so it was a bonus to give that system a reason for being. Overlord can best be described as a comedy hack and slash game that puts you in the role of a “villain” who controls a horde of hilarious minions with varied abilities to aid you in your evil quests. Like many games over the last decade, your actions and choices along the way shape your reputation. Overlord 2 offers the player the choice of two different flavors of evil, destruction and domination. This essentially boils down to killing your enemies, and the inhabitants of your conquered lands, or using magic to enslave them to your cause. There are multiple endings, but the choices didn’t really feel like they made much impact on the story, or the game in general other than monetary and equipment benefits. I killed the first major “choice” character without knowing about the option of enslaving them, so I embraced destruction as a way of life for my play through after that. That option seems to be more about instant gratification for gold and spirits instead of getting a steady stream of offerings from your enslaved subjects.
As far as game controls go, controlling your minions is very straight forward and intuitive, but controlling the Overlord is slightly less so. Over the course of the game you acquire three different spells and each spell can be used two different ways depending on the button you press and how long you hold it, which just never really clicked for me. Ultimately, I ended up using one spell for the majority of the game. Your minions do a lot of the work, so I didn’t get the feeling I was missing out on a significant piece of gameplay and I don’t recall relying on magic much in the first game either.
If you played Overlord 1, Overlord 2 is an improvement in most every way on a game that wasn’t particularly flawed to begin with. The story is loaded with humor and ridiculousness (like the overlord causing global warming) that kept the game from ever feeling like it was dragging. I put maybe 25 hours in, so it wasn’t too much of a time sink. There is a multiplayer piece that has been added that wasn’t in the first game, but I had zero interest in that. I feel like Satan himself is sitting in meeting rooms telling developers of single player games that they need to spend time adding in multiplayer. Why else would God of War Ascension EVER have had a multiplayer option? Because the devil made them do it and probably explains why Ascension was the weakest of the franchise. Thankfully, Overlord 2 didn’t seem to suffer from having this bastard appendage stuck on to the side of it.
Once I finished consolidating my evil domain, I decided to see what was going on with Little Nightmares (XB1). I picked this up during a sale and didn’t really know what I was getting in to. What a creepy, wonderful little game! Little Nightmares is a horror, platforming, puzzle game with zero dialogue or text. You guide a childlike figure in a yellow raincoat through five levels filled with giants who don’t take kindly to trespassers should they become aware of you. There’s no real combat, so avoiding danger requires stealth, which isn’t something I enjoy in a game usually, but it wasn’t so strict that it killed the game for me. The main game is short, even if you die quite a bit like I did during certain segments. There is DLC which adds an additional three levels with a different character that is absolutely worth it, but I did have more difficulty with the stealth and puzzles in the DLC compared to the main game. Despite the shortness, or if you’re looking for just a quick jaunt of a game to cleanse your palate, then I highly recommend giving Little Nightmares a go.
That’s it for now! Welcome back if you’ve been here before. If you’re new, welcome aboard. If you’ve played Overlord or Little Nightmares I’d love to hear your impression of them. If not, hopefully they’re on your radar now to give them a chance.
The Table Stacks 