I started and finished Overlord 2 last week. It was roughly 10 hours long with me taking the time to grind out as many of the achievements as possible with one playthrough. If you played the first Overlord you pretty much know what to expect.  It is an action-adventure title where you play as an Evil Overlord trying to take control of the known world. There is a lot of funny dialog and story lines throughout the game.

You start off Overlord II as the “Overlad”. You are a boy learning to control his powers and terrorizing local villagers. After getting run out of town you escape the Roman Empire’s armies with the help of your minions. You minions are small gremlin type animals who will fight and loot places for you. In doing so though you get frozen in a block of ice.  By the time your minions rescue you from the ice years have passed and the Roman Empire controls most of the lands. You then proceed to take back portions of it piece by piece while upgrading your magical abilities and your control over your minions.

After freeing the first town you get your first mistress who helps upgrade your Tower and your minions.  She is the only person who helped you out as a kid.  As the game progresses you get a couple more mistresses which leads to a lot of funny moments in the Tower as the argue with each other of who is #1.

As the story plays out you end up having a couple more towns to take over as well as the Elven Sanctuary.  In each location you have the option to enslave all the towns fold so the mine for you, making you a lot of money, or just kill them off and destroy the town. One annoying thing about this process is that to complete the quest related to each town you either have to enslave or kill all 100 of the town’s villagers. However, since there are exactly 100 villagers if you accidentally kill even one villager you can’t then enslave them because you need all 100 for that achievement.  Fortunately there is an achievement for enslaving and anther for destroying so either way you’ll get an achievement.  I just found it frustrating to enslave 97 villagers only to find out that I had accidentally killed 3 at some point. So, I had to then go back and kill off all of my hard works who were making me a lot of gold to get the achievement.

Overall the game was fun enough to play through once because off all the humor and the fun of playing as dark ruler who gets to go around killing gnomes and unicorns for fun.  The game does have one thing I found really annoying and that is the lack of a save option.  The game only saves when you are in your Tower and exit or if you complete a main potion of a mission it will auto-save.  However, since some of the missions are very lengthy it can be over an hour or two between saves if you’re working through the main game. As long as you play a little carefully you really don’t die too much but if you did you could have an hours worth of stuff to redo.  Plus, when I play there is always a chance I’ll need to stop suddenly so not having an option to save anywhere is just lame. Especially when much larger and more complex games like Assassins Creed II and Fallout 3 give you that option. Still, even with the saving and achievement annoyances Overlord II was fun for the most part. If you’re looking for something short to play solo it worth a rent.