Overlord: Dark Legend (Nintendo Wii)

Overlord: Dark Legend is a prequel to Overlord redesigned for the Wii.

You control young Lord Gromgard, who is reclaiming his father’s duchy where elves, dwarfs and bandits have eroded his power and the peasants no longer fear him. To make things worse, his older brother and sister are planning to usurp his father. On his sixteenth birthday, he is given a suit of armor that belonged to his uncle, the Black Baron, which allows him to take his place as the Overlord.

As in the other Overlord games, you’ll do fairly little of your own fighting. Most of the game is played through manipulating your minions. You direct your minions with the Wiimote and move the overlord himself with the Nunchuck. There are four types of minions: You start with browns, who are good melee fighters. As you progress, you gain reds, who are are immune to fire and can attack from a distance with fireballs, blues, who are healers and can swim and greens, who can turn invisible and clear poison.

Minions are summoned by spending life force, which you gain from fallen enemies. Unlike other games in the series, this is not color specific. Gromgard can make his minions attack a specific target, which could be an enemy or an object. Minions collect weapons and armor from enemies and things they smash and use them to improve their abilities. He can also throttle a minion, which causes them to explode. Different minions do different kinds of damage. He can quick-kill them for a boost of mana or health, depending on minion type, or make them sacrifice themselves in a blood or mana pit for a larger boost of mana or health. Mana and health can also be refilled more traditionally by picking up items or having the minions do it. He can control where the minions go by placing waypoints. All active minions will stay there until told to move.

Game progression is represented by a map. Each section of the map has its own sub-map. This map shows the location of the minion summoning sites, mana pits, blood pits and teleportation sites. The Overlord can teleport to any site he has previously visited. Generally speaking, each sub-section of the map is a level and many of them end in boss fights. Progression is controlled by barriers that require a certain number of minions or a certain type of minions to pass or require you to have found some item, like a missing spoke for a wheel you must turn.

As you progress through the game, you will find items that minion relics, health relics, mana relics, forges, spell relics and hives. Minion relics increase the maximum number of minions you can summon. Health or mana relics increase the size of your health or mana bar. Forges gives you the ability to buy new weapons and armor and level-up your minions with the gold you’ve collected from enemies and side-quests. Spell relics gives you new spells and hives give you access to new types of minions. All of these require four minions to pick them up. They will then walk to the nearest teleporter to send it back to your castle and you must protect them or their way their.

Spells can be direct offensive attacks, boosts to your minions abilities or handicaps to enemies. Casting them drains mana.