Playing A Game Overlord: Dark Legend Wii

Dark Legend makes a few welcome changes to the Overlord formula: shared Life Force for all minion types, purchasable minion upgrades at the Castle Forge, and an in-game map that resembles sense. But not all its ideas work out. Pointing at the screen to order your horde is great in theory, but in practice is often marred by shoddy pathfinding and minions getting stuck in the environment. And the manual camera control would be useful if not for its undersensitivity, and the fact that ordering minions and rotating the camera simultaneously is unfeasible.

All this is compounded by the game generally feeling like a remedial version of the original - and while you might imagine that a less-frustrating Overlord would be a winning formula, in execution it just feels silly and insubstantial. The simple controls and barely-navigable environment ensure that enemy encounters are nothing more than point-and-button-mashfests. Also, there is a waggle move to blow things up by sacrificing minions? So you get to lose control of the battle for several seconds, foolishly shake a Wii remote, and lose part of your fighting force, all at once. Excellent.

The story isn't at all interesting (you know the ending even before the game begins), and the writing doesn't seem up to franchise quality. That's the character writing, mind - the in-game encyclopedia was certainly written by a cadre of underpaid interns, as it has about as much life as the 3,000+ Nazis I recently killed. And I never like being that guy, but the graphics are distractingly bad; the game tends to run at a good clip (aside from occasional chugging), but the incredibly low level of detail makes everything blend together. And visible interlacing, really? What year is this? Come on.

Even if Dark Legend did nothing but improve from here on out - I only finished two of the twelve (linear) quests - it is so dramatically held back, as in, couldn't pass the fifth grade on its own, that I can't imagine it surpassing "meh" territory. But there's no way I'll slog through the rest of the game to find out.

Progress: Gave Up -- Reclaimed the Castle Forge