In 1964, Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart wrote that “hard-core pornography” was hard to define, but that “I know it when I see it.”

As a fake game journalist here at Sarcastic Gamer, game quality is hard to define, but having been a gamer for a quarter century, I feel qualified to say that I, too, “know it when I see it”.

Sorry, put away your wangs, people, we’re not talking about hard-core pr0n here.  We’re talking about game quality.  And when it comes to overall quality of Overlord 2, it falls short of the mark.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’ve played through the game and am at the final boss fight as I write this.  I’ve had a heck of a lot of fun sweeping my horde of minions into battle, clubbing baby seals and massacring elven eco-warriors. You could do a lot worse with your time (see my reviewsical of Damnation), and overall, it’s a fun experience with a decent concept behind it.

For those of you who may have missed the first serving of Overlord, the story line is simple, yet unique.  You play as a force of nature dressed in platemail known as the Overlord.  You have a series of different imp-like minions that gather around your legs and do your bidding with the sweeping of your analog stick.  The setting takes place in some mythical land of fantastic beasts, and your job is to generally crush the countryside ‘neath your mailed fist.  Story writer Rhianna Pratchett, who wrote for Mirror’s Edge and the first Overlord , has done a lovely job twisting this Grimm fairy tale around common convention.

Triumph Studio has made enough mechanic changes to turn the sequel into it’s own game and not just a simply continuation of the first Overlord (although now that I think about it…) but if you’ve played the first game, you’ve got the general idea of how this one goes.

This time around, there is more of a strategic focus on use of minions: in the first Overlord most of your combat could be overcome with mob mentality, where you would lock on a target and sweep your mob of minions over top of them, hoping they would take it down.  With the addition of enemy formations and specific minion mounts, it forces you to use your minions’ specialties more to defeat your enemies.  Before, you could arm your minions with the weapons of fallen enemies; now, you can now level and resurrect your favorite and most powerful minions at your domain.

Despite all the new additions to the gameplay, the overarching problem here is that the game’s lack of mechanical polish really detracts from the experience.  While you’ll still take delight in sweeping your minion horde into a house and watching them loot the place, that unintentional grin that creeps onto your face will quickly be replaced with a snarl when you suffer through a glitch that causes you to get stuck for three hours.

Seeing as I had to make two trips to GameFAQs to look up game solutions that had no answers and only required my turning the game off and turning it back on, it tends to take away any good-timey vibes I was having. If you rent this game, which I’m suggesting you do, I dare you to get all the way through the game without getting mad about the something in game.  The mounting frustrations I felt by the end of the game made me decide against going through again for my Platinum trophy.

The in-game camera controls felt wonky as they are controlled by the right analog stick.  The right stick also controls your minions, and I can’t count the number of times I would be trying to turn the camera, and instead move my minions around, and vice versa.  The lock on function is similar in nature.  Click on the right trigger to lock onto the nearest…thing.  Again, I find myself clicking, trying to lock on the bomb hissing at my feet, only to have the smart targeting lock me into a nearby cart.

Never mind the load times.  Every load is a big load time, which makes doing anything at your sanctuary a chore to the point of not wanting to do it.  The resurrection process is a perfect example.  You’ve got dozens of dead minions, and resurrecting each one results in a ten second cutscene of him coming back to life, you suddenly find yourself dreading that trip to the graveyard to bring back your champions.

And there’s so much of the game undefined: I can upgrade my minion hives up to five times.  What does each upgrade do for them? What is the difference between a level 7 brown minion and a level 7 green minion in their melee attacks?  The game has a crafting system, which leaves giant gaping questions, such as why should I craft an axe over a sword or club?  Am I really forced to use the old Phantasy Star 2 technique of “Well, it costs more, therefore, it must be better” in this day and age?  You’ve literally got a dozen weapon and armor choices by the end of the game, with nothing more to go off of than cost and name. You’ve got a choice of three mistresses throughout the course of the game, and their respective purposes outside of which mount you can use in the final battle seems useless.  Was there more to it?

I think you get my point.

The cutscenes are atrociously bad when it came to audio/video sync.  During your sacking of the game’s capital city, your Overlord comes across a wealthy merchant whose store has been demolished, and he asks you for a “bailout”.  The Dark Lord proceeds to fry him with a lightning bolt.  This would have been a great tongue-and-cheek cutscene, but I was so distracted at the merchant’s frantic motions not in time with his erratic dialogue, followed by the complete silence of the game when the Overlord blasts him with the lightning…over and over and over.  This isn’t a case of lips matching spoken words, this is a case of words not being spoken when lips are moving and vice versa.  Camera angles all over the place, disjointed….aaargh!

There’s multiplayer, but I haven’t touched it.

Look.  It’s a fun game, and I enjoyed it.  But it could have been so much more, and it’s disappointing that all of their ambitious additions were so badly hamstrung by poor game mechanics.  Play it, enjoy it…but be prepared to get angry at it.

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