What evil lurks inside the hearts of man? Only the Shadow - and videogame developers - knows. Ever since Populous first granted you godlike powers to rain down fiery misery on a hapless humanity in the late 80's, it seems videogames and the people who play them have had an unhealthy obsession with the darker side of our psyche. But besides god-games and RPG's, evil really hasn't gotten much of a look in other genres, until now, that is!

Describing Overlord in a single sentence isn't an appealing prospect: it's one part puzzle, one part strategy, and one part action-adventure with a generous drizzle of dry British humour garnished with shavings of evilness. It is one of those games that defies labelling and refuses to stick to any one genre, as the various comparisons made with other games reveals: people have said Overlord looks like Fable on Xbox, plays like Pikmin on Gamecube and has the spirit of Dungeon Keeper on PC. So just what exactly *is* Overlord?

The game begins with your character being rudely awoken by a mob of ugly little critters that look like a nasty cross between your stereotypical goblins and the House Elves from Harry Potter – short, painfully skinny, big ears, sharp teeth and a mean temperament. It seems that you have been brought back from the brink by these beasties with one task in mind: restore the Dark Tower of the Overlord that terrorises the lands and strikes fear into the hearts of men and women. But you're weak, you've been out of the game for awhile, so you'll be needing help, which is where those ugly little critters come in.

These little buggers will serve as your minions, an unswervingly loyal pack of followers who will do you bidding no matter what it is. Through them, you will regain your power, extend your reach, and ultimately impact the world around you for better or worse. Controlling your minion is a cinch; looking in a direction and squeezing the right trigger will send your horde surging forth, leaving it up to them as to what they are doing. Or hold down the left trigger to lock-on to specific objects, enemies or targets to focus their attention and get guaranteed results. Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly of all, you can simply move the right stick to "sweep” you minions as you please, giving you direct control over the movements of the whole horrid herd.

It sounds pretty straightforward, and it is, which makes managing your mob a simple and fun practice, and allows you to pick your own style of play – your minions can be a blunt instrument of destruction, or a precision tool of evil, it's really up to you. They're pretty damn funny too – clambering onto the backs of enemies to beat them over the head, wearing pumpkins and pots on their heads in lieu of armour...rarely are they not entertaining! This strategic element is compounded by the fact there is not one but four different types of minions under your command – you only start with the Brown tribe though, you have to find the rest and reclaim them for your evil empire. Each of the little tribal trolls has their own unique abilities and skills: the Reds are immune to fire and can throw fireballs at your foes or the environment; Blues can swim and walk in water safely, as well as resurrect your fallen fiends; the Greens are like ninja assassins who can safely neutralise poisons and go stealth to attack unsuspecting foes. The Browns are your basic grunts, the foot soldiers of your callous campaign of conquest, and you will use them more than any other minion type.

Overlord's biggest strength and weakness is really the minion system, because you can play the game quite strategically, or you can just rush in and swarm all your minions out and hope for the best. Both strategies are viable in most situations, what differs is the amount of casualties your cohort may suffer. As an evil warlord this should bother you not a jot – in fact you should relish the death of friends and foes with equal pleasure – however your minions serve another nefarious purpose outside of the field of battle: they can be sacrificed en masse to increase your own personal equipment!

You see while the focus is on the minions, your Overlord is hardly neglected – you can increase your health and mana, learn new spells, and as mentioned, upgrade your armour and weapons. There are two tiers to this; the metal used and minion sacrifices. Scattered throughout the world are forges – steel, durium and arcanium – which can be used to smelt armour, a helmet and your choice of sword, axe or mace as a weapon. Each material has base attributes, as well as a minion-cap, which is the maximum amount of lackeys you can slaughter to increase the abilities of your gear. These include adding fire damage or increasing critical hit chances on weapons, added defence and regenerative properties on armour, and the ability to control more minions on your helmet. To upgrade every tier of gear to the maximum in the game will require several thousand minion sacrifices, which is a staggering amount.

To get these outrageous amounts of minions, you'll need to harvest life force and lots of it. Almost every enemy you kill contains life force, with a colour that corresponds to your minions and the enemy's own attributes (so if you kill a fire beetle expect red life force). This gets added to your available pool of available minions, who you can take into battle, or sacrifice at the altar for your own personal advancement. What really works well for Overlord is that the game gives you a bit of choice as to how you want to proceed with the business of being bad. It isn't a free-roaming title by any stretch, but at numerous junctions you'll have the choice of two or even three story-threads to pursue, and revisiting old areas with new minion tribes can yield spells, money-bags or upgrades you couldn't reach previously. You can also drop back into the levels simply to harvest more minion life force to strengthen your horde or so you can sacrifice more of the little beggars to enhance your gear.

While mucking around is all well and good, as Overlord you still have a job to do, which is to spread the dark pall of evil across the land. To that end, there's actually a pretty enjoyable storyline to follow, and while the overall story arc is a little weak, you will always have something to do when you arrive in a new area. For example when you reach Evernight, the forest home of the elves, it becomes apparent that an evil corruption of nature that isn't you has set up shop and is now running the show. So while there are numerous sub-missions and things to do, your main task will be to take down this baddie and replace it with yourself.

This is where Overlord starts to falter a little bit, however. For a game so heavily invested in evilness, your deeds in the storyline never feel particularly heinous. To use the Evernight as an example again, the new "evil” is actually an Elven hero who has been poisoned, so putting him out of his misery and saving the forest suddenly doesn't seem that bad-ass, does it? Indeed, Overlord feels a little bit like "lite evil”, though there are some pretty evil decisions you can make if you want to. The game actually measures your dastardly deeds, and it is possible to finish the game with 0% evil or 100% evil if you really strive to hit either end of the spectrum – and there's an Achievement for both, requiring two playthroughs if you want to get as many Gamerscore points as you can!

Visually, Overlord looks great, with detailed characters and environments all running super-smooth in high-definition and 16:9 widescreen, even with 50 minions plus enemies all battling it out at once. The style is very reminiscent of Fable, taking your standard high-fantasy stuff and exaggerating it for comic effect. The biggest complaint most people will have is with the camera, which is fixed behind you and moves itself automatically unless you intervene. Doing so requires holding down the Left Button and using the right thumbstick, which is pretty awkward and you will often find yourself defaulting to just using the thumbstick as you would in most games. This will of course sweep your minions instead, interrupting the flow of battle or whatever they are doing. A simple menu option to reverse this so LB+Right Stick = sweep would have totally solved this problem, and it's a shame they didn't include it.

Honestly though, it's a fairly minor complain, which is also true of the audio department. Sure, it could do with a few more sound-bites for the minions and enemies to stop things getting repetitive, but it isn't game-breaking or even particularly annoying. Your minions are pretty simple little beasts, so expecting a wider vocabulary is probably asking a bit much from them. Elsewhere, the British voice acting makes the jokes and dialogue funnier than it probably is, and casting all the elves as whiny Americans is gold. The music is similarly solid; the sickeningly sweet pastoral strings in and around the main village will make you want to kill things, and later on, the soundtrack keeps up with the action as it becomes more epic.

Overlord's singleplayer game is well-paced, and weighs in at about 15-20 hours of solid enjoyment. There's a dungeon where you can battle previously bested enemies in larger, more powerful groups if you want a further challenge, but perhaps the most pleasant inclusion is that of multiplayer. Normally the domain of tacked-on, feature-checking for the blurb on the box, here it is a surprisingly fun game mode that will definitely extend the lifespan of the title. You can play two player survival co-op which is awesome fun with a friend, or you can play adversarial modes in a deathmatch or treasure-hunting flavour. Both modes start you off with no powers or spells and a tiny minion horde, and you have to balance expansion with aggression. It's a wonderful addition to a fantastic game, and well worth a look even if you normally don't enjoy multiplayer.