David’s Retro Rewind | Overlord: Raising Hell

I’ve had all four games in the Overlord franchise on Steam collecting dust in my library for ages now. It wasn’t until very recently that my interest was piqued enough for me to actually play one of them. That was sparked when Alexx pitched the Overlord series to me as “Pikmin, but bad.” I’ve never played any of the Pikmin games, so I can’t directly compare any of them to Overlord: Raising Hell. Nevertheless, I knew Alexx wouldn’t make that comparison idly, so I decided to try out Overlord: Raising Hell and see what it’s all about.

I think I’ve begun to realize why Alexx made that comparison. It’s ringing increasingly true for me as I spend more time with Overlord: Raising Hell. I’ll get into that shortly, however, because I want to start by telling you the story of the first half-hour that I spent trying to play Overlord: Raising Hell. Note my use of the word “trying” there. I was able to get Raising Hell running at a stable frame rate at my primary monitor’s ultrawide resolution easily, to my surprise. The problem was that I couldn’t get any sound from the game at first.

In order to fix that, I had to uninstall Raising Hell via Steam and then reinstall both it and the original version of Overlord without the subtitle tacked on. Then I had to make sure I launched Raising Hell specifically. I guess that makes sense in that Raising Hell is an expansion to the base version of Overlord, even though the Internet made it seem that I didn’t need to bother with the base version. That confusion about the Steam version of a decades-old game meant that Overlord: Raising Hell didn’t make the best possible first impression on me.

Thankfully, I fixed that technical hiccup easily and quickly enough. I’m pleased to report that Raising Hell’s gameplay and sense of humor have done quite a lot to help me forget about that rocky start. You play as the titular Overlord, a particularly evil human who was brought back from the dead by your minions. Keep in mind, this is before the Despicable Me film franchise managed to utterly corrupt the public’s concept of the definition of the word “minions.” Your main overarching objective is to rebuild the mystical tower that serves as your lair.

The first few bullet points on that list are a crane, a smelter, and a female companion you’ll keep around to ensure you’ll have someone other than your minions to talk to. With the help of the crane, you’ll be able to start clearing out the debris within your tower to restore access to more and more rooms. The smelter will allow you to create stronger weapons and armor for yourself. I hasten to clarify that Rose, the female companion I mentioned, volunteers to join you because she’s every bit as evil as you and your minions are.

It isn’t like you’re keeping her inside your lair against her will or anything like that. “Game recognizes game,” as I’m told the youth say. As the Overlord, you’ll eventually gain the ability to summon four different types of minions: Browns, reds, greens, and blues. Browns are good at melee combat. Reds can absorb fire and have a ranged attack. Greens can absorb poison and are skilled in stealth, and blues can swim. You start out only able to summon brown minions, but they’ll suffice well enough to get you by until you gain the ability to summon the other types.

You’ll have to find the “hives” of the other three minion types and teleport them back to your tower in order to gain the ability to summon them. To summon any minions, you’ll need some of the corresponding life force. Most enemies and creatures provide brown life force, but only certain types of enemies can drop red, green, and blue life force. This can be particularly annoying when you have to go out of your way to find and defeat some of those specific enemy types in order to summon the minions you need to bypass obstacles.

Even if you have enough of each type of life force, you can only acquire minions from so-called “minion gates” that correspond to their color. These usually appear at the points where you first enter each zone, and they can be scattered throughout zones as well. You press Shift to lock onto whichever minion gate you want, and then either right-click to summon forth new minions of that type or left-click to get rid of some of those minions. Since you can only control a minion horde of a certain size at any one time, the ability to swap out minions is handy.

Now we’re getting into why that “Pikmin, but bad” comparison is apt. Since your minions are much smaller and more agile than you, they can get to places that are far out of your reach. However, to cause them to do this, you have to hold both mouse buttons simultaneously and sweep your mouse in the direction you want your creatures to go. This is a significant accessibility concern for those who have difficulty with this control scheme. It seems I get a “double dose” of issues with this because my dexterity isn’t great, and my mouse hand is my non-dominant hand.

This can be especially frustrating because when you have to guide your minions across dangerous terrain – which you’ll have to do frequently – your minions will all come running back to you as soon as you let go of the mouse buttons unless you press Q to create a “guard point.” For example, if you’ve just had to navigate a horde of non-blue minions past water that will kill them if they enter it, and you have to let go of the mouse buttons before pressing Q to make your minions stay put, they’ll likely die trying to return to you.

The controls for guiding minions in this way are finicky at the best of times, even if you don’t have any related accessibility issues. The minions’ pathing AI is usually decent enough, but there are times when it can really wreak havoc on anything you’re trying to do. I’ve also had difficulty sweeping my minions around because my lack of depth perception often makes me unable to tell when things like hills and inclines might be impassable. Developers making games more widely accessible wasn’t nearly as much of a thing when Overlord: Raising Hell released compared to now, and it shows.

There are quite a few other accessibility pitfalls I could mention, but I think you get the idea. As I said, I’ve never played any of the Pikmin games, so I can’t directly compare them to Overlord: Raising Hell. Even so, I still think I’ve discovered much of what Alexx was getting at when he made that comparison. I certainly don’t think Overlord: Raising Hell is a bad game overall, but it does really show its age. There are definitely parts of Raising Hell that have been problematic for me and will likely be even more so for some players.