While a lot of games are bad, it takes a special kind of awfulness to make me just want to write “BLARGH” 5000 times and call that the review. Overlord is not the worst game ever, but the series’ heritage makes this mess all the more insulting.
The original Overlord game and its sequel were not great, but they were somewhat unique and a ton of fun. Basically, you were an evil Sauron-type guy with a minion army, which you used to do your devilish deeds. It had a quaint sense of humour and some interesting mechanics; traits that made it more compelling than its overall quality would suggest.
None of those positives are true of Fellowship of Evil. I could only tolerate the game for a few hours – a rare thing for me – but even that was honestly longer than it merited on its own terms. My notes for this review just look like a list of synonyms for mean words.
Instead of being a third-person action game like its predecessors, it’s basically just a shallow Diablo clone, with the most stripped-down RPG elements you could imagine. Its one defining gimmick is that you rely on your minions to do most of the fighting for you. However, unlike in those previous games, you have zero direct control of the little buggers.
Their AI might as well stand for absolutely infuriating, with the minions showing no co-ordination or situational intelligence whatsoever; constantly running into traps and magic grass that turns them into enemies, so you’re always either losing allies or creating more enemies, thus the only defining feature of the game is borderline unusable. The minions have different elemental effects based on their colour, but none of them seem to do anything interesting or demand much tactical thought.
You’re also limited to just a few of them until you upgrade, so you never have a surplus when you need it, which is all the time. The enemies swarm all over you, with powerful champions a near-constant annoyance. This is possibly because the game seems like it’s only balanced for multiplayer, which nobody is playing. This makes the game frustratingly hard, but definitely not the satisfyingly challenging kind of hard. Just hard because it’s crap.
Making it worse is the fact that the battles are lengthy and repetitive with a poor checkpoint system. You’ll be fighting the same tedious battles against generic enemies over and over, spamming the same summon buttons constantly. It’s pure monotony.
Despite being the lord of all evil, your character is a weakling, whoever it is you choose. There are four “characters” to choose from, but they’re barely even archetypes. Your only real choice is melee or ranged combat, as their unique styles are pathetically bland. All you do is hammer the attack button when you aren’t summoning minions.
None of it, even their special abilities, feels satisfying or precise. The controls as a whole feel stodgy and clunky. Aiming is very wonky, with movement being slow with no real animations. There is a dodge move, which is a super short range teleport and does nothing useful. That dodge is mapped to the right stick for no logical reason, which really should have been for aiming so moving and shooting wasn’t so stop and start.
The animations for all this are awful too. The characters look and feel like they’re running at about 10 frames per second, which drops even more when the game stutters as it regularly does. It’s especially weird, because the graphics are very ordinary. On a technical level they’re okay, but from an art design standpoint they’re muddy and bland.
The game is also quite buggy. Minions glitch and vibrate while standing still, characters fully clip through scenery into places they shouldn’t be, enemies spasm around and worst of all, the sound was apparently designed by either a moron or a torturer.
When you or an enemy gets hit they make a very, very loud groaning noise. Well, honestly it sounds more like a distorted orgasm grunt but whatever. This sound triggers constantly – CONSTANTLY – to the point where I actually got a headache. The only way it can be turned off is by turning off all the sound effects. It’s bloody awful.
The only things going for this game are extremely, strenuously subjective things. It’s “only” $23 at time of writing, which is way cheaper than a big game but way more expensive than an indie game or mobile game – which this feels like. It’s also decently long, if you’re mad enough to tolerate awful gameplay and pointless missions.
The humour in the game is kind of similar to the old games, as it’s apparently once again written by Rhianna Pratchett, who also wrote the recently released Rise of the Tomb Raider. I don’t know how much of this she penned, but – I’m sorry Rhianna – it’s devoid of charm. The cringe-worthy jokes are flat out irritating and the dialogue is either plain exposition or garbage filler.
Summary
Overlord: Fellowship of Evil is not even vaguely, remotely fun. The gameplay is horrible to control, frustrating to endure and monotonous to the point of having less variation than one of those tabletop metronome ball things. It wastes the concept and offers nothing to anyone that has ever heard of another video game.
Dean was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 39 articles across game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @SpookyWomble.