Zero Punctuation: Overlord 2

[mike1921]

is it just me or is Yahtzee not really trying with this one? it seems emotionless compared to others and all the rants seemed forced. given its not the best game to play but still

Exactly. He phoned it in. First, he says "The game is too easy. BORING!" then, as soon as it gets challenging, he quits. Yes, I've played through this game. Yes, I know the spot he's talking about. Yes, it's frustrating.

But it's on THE SECOND STAGE. Yahtzee is telling you it's crap while barely playing through a quarter of the darn game. WTF?

The mistresses DO give you a mechanical benefit at the end of the game (something he wouldn't know about), there IS a point to rezzing minions beyond having cutely named guys show up again and again. And he's LYING when he says you can just summon a gazillion minions again and again at no cost. Playing that way will run you out of life-force fast. There is *gasp* gameplay to this game.

This isn't the first time he's done this either. He did it with Mass Effect (Ignoring a morality system that doesn't suck, skipping past all the dialogue and then complaining that the story isn't good enough, and MISSING HUGE FAULTS like the fact that you have to melt all your cool new gear if you didn't sell all your stuff at some point) and Prototype ("You don't need any experience because the whip-arm is all you need" setting aside the fact that the blade arm is far superior for boss-fights, what about all the other stuff you need to spend experience on?) How can a review be useful if he can't be asked to finish a game, misses obvious good or bad points, and mostly just whines and complains to whine and complain?

Yahtzee is great when he pegs the zietgeist of a game, or when he skewers a flaw that the rest of us might not have noticed, but this review, seriously... They pay him for this? I wish I could quit what I was doing and vaguely say "O ya, it totally sucks. Gimme a paycheck now" too.

You can't really blame him that much, I mean in the tutorial I was able to tell I'd be fucked if a real puzzle comes along in the demo. Which annoyed me to no end because that's not what I was doing/wanted to be doing 99% of the time. It's like God of war, I love when I'm killing shit but when you give me a puzzle sequence I'll only be able to get passed it if I have gamefaqs handy, hopefully there are some fun monsters to fight during the puzzle sequence so I could not bore myself to death (really , who the hell thought it'd be a good ideas to add puzzles to a fast paced action game?). If the whole game or a fuckton of the game was that minion controlling thing the game'd be as unplayable as it deserves to be for forcing you to do that shit.

I think it'd be pretty cruel and unecisary to make a critic play through a whole game. I mean, if they liked it they'll probably play to the end anyway, and if they didn't like it and the audience of the critique agrees with him they probably won't either. Thanks for telling us that benefit . Also, this is just the demo but I was able to get enough life force to summon as many imps as I'd ever want.


Making a critic play a bad game through to the end will do what exactly? I never expect to hear, from anyone"wade through this massive ocean of shit for the ending" .

Agreed.


You exaggerate, a lot.

 

[insanelogics]

It may be possible Overlord 2 was made for a certain kind of mentality and Yahtzee ain't one of'em.And btw you don't revive a minion becouse you like him ,you revive him becouse he's better eqiped from battles and pay with other minion's lives not gold.

 

[Jursa]

I actually liked the first overlord so I tried out the second one and truthfully I can't pick the bloody game up... My subconscious is trying to tell me to avoid being bored out of my mind.

 

[Silva]

Yahtzee, it's one thing that you are damn funny, but it's just another to show just how much you want a job with Valve by giving them a gigantic free plug for the most INconvenient game download service most people will ever use. Maybe you're lucky but there are more glitches in Steam than there are in your average sandbox game, and we both know that that is saying something.

Anyone who thinks a game download service is more convenient than a store two blocks away is probably not just lazy, but fused to their chairs by way of flab. Or they're making a plug that they're paid for, or want to be paid for.

Hmm I was actually thinking about buying this off of steam and now I know not to thanks yahtzee.

I second that notion.

 

[Jirlond]

Yahtzee, it's one thing that you are damn funny, but it's just another to show just how much you want a job with Valve by giving them a gigantic free plug for the most INconvenient game download service most people will ever use. Maybe you're lucky but there are more glitches in Steam than there are in your average sandbox game, and we both know that that is saying something.

Anyone who thinks a game download service is more convenient than a store two blocks away is probably not just lazy, but fused to their chairs by way of flab. Or they're making a plug that they're paid for, or want to be paid for.

Hmm I was actually thinking about buying this off of steam and now I know not to thanks yahtzee.

I second that notion.

Steam is about as cheap as yahtzee's mum. Not very cheap at all!

 

[znix]

I tried the first Overlord game and it was actually pretty fun.

I haven't tried the sequel yet, but I will soon. If we were to trust Y for which games are worth playing, we'd all be stuck playing Thief and Psychonauts and a few more games adding up to less than a handful.

So, thanks for the funny review, but I'll play the game anyway, and enjoy it!

 

[magicdemon71]

how can the actors have British accent??
it's is a dutch game

 

[JimmyFuzz]

*Arranges desktop icons in a smiley face*

I agree wholeheartedly with everything he says in this one.

 

[dudeman0001]

Oh cool, he's reviewing games that have numbers at the end, maybe next week he'll review Street Fighter IV or Killzone 2.

Anyways this was a great review, as usual.

"People say i'd like these games and I don't really know how to respond to that..."

 

[Lord_Jaroh]

BY GOD! YAHTZEE STOP REVIEWING STUFF ON THE WRONG PLATFORMS

And give the developers a little credit for the dark humor they put in which in some points actually quite resembles your's

I mean the whole game is A rip on the fantasy universe have you not played the first game do you not get what It's about

Usually I agree with you but this is a game that actually seems to be you YES I said you if you we're to be a game

Then maybe developers should stop putting the games on consoles they weren't designed for to make a quick buck from unassuming people, eh?

 

[Stabby Joe]

how can the actors have British accent??
it's is a dutch game

Then stop using Irish and British voice actors for Fallout 3!

 

[sneak_copter]

I'm downloading that PDF.

 

[Jeffman12]

You can't really blame him that much, I mean in the tutorial I was able to tell I'd be fucked if a real puzzle comes along in the demo. Which annoyed me to no end because that's not what I was doing/wanted to be doing 99% of the time. It's like God of war, I love when I'm killing shit but when you give me a puzzle sequence I'll only be able to get passed it if I have gamefaqs handy, hopefully there are some fun monsters to fight during the puzzle sequence so I could not bore myself to death (really , who the hell thought it'd be a good ideas to add puzzles to a fast paced action game?). If the whole game or a fuckton of the game was that minion controlling thing the game'd be as unplayable as it deserves to be for forcing you to do that shit.

Yahtzee can't use the same excuse you can as he made a game based on puzzles, and nobody's paying you to write a review, so you don't have to play it, which I'm pretty sure you haven't anyway.

Making a critic play a bad game through to the end will do what exactly? I never expect to hear, from anyone"wade through this massive ocean of shit for the ending".

Just because you don't have the capacity for puzzle solving, which you admit, doesn't mean it's a bad game, it just makes it ill-suited to your playstyle. It's a critics job to play through it. That's what they're payed for, giving a review to its entirety. He stopped playing probably around the use of the fire minions, he doesn't even mention blue or green, let alone what they do. This suggests he didn't even read the manual. Part of each review should be based on how easily you can get a hang of the game, if he's unwilling to learn. Furthermore, maybe there's some redeeming quality later on, like, I don't know, having access to all the minion types. Simply put, don't even try to back it up unless you're going to play through and make a decent objective review that explains the pros and cons. And then you can throw in why you hate it and the developer should go die in a bush, or whatever drivel you want to add. Maybe The Escapist will pay you instead then.

Then maybe developers should stop putting the games on consoles they weren't designed for to make a quick buck from unassuming people, eh?

As was the case with Ghostbusters. Even then, he did have a point criticizing the dumb AI.

 

[Cobopolies]

I agree with the mouse/keyboard combo kind of sucking a little bit. I used it for like 5 mins, up until you had to move all your minions around, and then I plugged in my Xbox controller *GASP* OMG, really? PC's have controllers? Just like consoles? Who would have thought...Anyway, the game played much better.

I thought Overlord 2 was alright. I didn't mind the linear aspect too much, I just thought their wasn't enough content, not enough side missions to do.

 

[minarri]

This week's wasn't a knee-slapper, but I think it was a huge improvement from the reviews of the last few weeks.

 

[Jacques 2]

If you're getting paid, do you're job, unless that job is some how unethical in regard to human rights and/or will result in the inability to use the money you are paid. I've been a fan of this review series for a while, but it seems to be getting full of it self, much like the web comics it criticized a few months ago. I heard less about the game and more about the boring things he did while not finishing it, oh and a lot of things about an ass, and about how being a dick is only fun if you're not supposed to be a dick. In that vein, the grand theft auto series must be shit, because you're playing a theif (usually a member of a gang or mafia or something related to those), that acts generally in a dickish manner and does dickish things to people (some of which go above and beyond the call of dick: see GTA SA in the mission regarding the construction workers that whistle are Kendel, the main character's sister). And what's the point of being a dick in HL2? you can hop on peoples heads, but it doesn't affect them, you can't kill allies, except during one chapter where you can command a useless squad of ally AIs that supply you with health, ammo, and an inability to effectively kill the enemy on their own, to their deaths by simply sending them into the thick of it and letting them die, beyond that, and the juvenile humor you can get by harassing people with bug bombs, to which no allies respond. Maybe Yahtzee enjoys that sort of thing, but I can't help but doubt that more people enjoy doing dickish things in GTA than in HL2, or maybe he's playing with SMod and kills his allies (in which case he'd run into a similar problem as Fallout 3's Dr. Braun where there's no one left to play with, well, except with the spawn command, but even that gets boring after a while)

That said, Overlord II and it's predecessor have flaws, some of which he did touch on, such as the uselessness of mistresses aside from the added presence of boobs to your grand chamber, and the control issue, albeit, explained until exhaustion. He didn't mention the humor which while not laugh worthy (usually) can bring a smirk to your face at the least.

 

[RedPanda]

I would certainly get bord indeed I guess...I dislike being a jerk but if the game makes u then it's like oh I can't be myself anyways? Lol, good points XD

 

[mike1921]

You can't really blame him that much, I mean in the tutorial I was able to tell I'd be fucked if a real puzzle comes along in the demo. Which annoyed me to no end because that's not what I was doing/wanted to be doing 99% of the time. It's like God of war, I love when I'm killing shit but when you give me a puzzle sequence I'll only be able to get passed it if I have gamefaqs handy, hopefully there are some fun monsters to fight during the puzzle sequence so I could not bore myself to death (really , who the hell thought it'd be a good ideas to add puzzles to a fast paced action game?). If the whole game or a fuckton of the game was that minion controlling thing the game'd be as unplayable as it deserves to be for forcing you to do that shit.

Yahtzee can't use the same excuse you can as he made a game based on puzzles, and nobody's paying you to write a review, so you don't have to play it, which I'm pretty sure you haven't anyway.

Like I said, I played the demo. It made me feel "ehhh". I'll get the full game when gamefly sends it to me.

I'm not saying GOW is a bad game, on the contrary, it'd be my favorite game of all time if they removed those fucking puzzles. And I did play it through the end despite the puzzles because the non-annoying parts of the thing was sooooo good. If you meant the minions with the mazes,that's a completely different kind of puzzle IMO. Please tell me if he made a game based on maze solving from an angle where you could barely see. Also, judging from his review of the darkness demo, he has the same problem with this kinda crap that I did.

Making a critic play a bad game through to the end will do what exactly? I never expect to hear, from anyone"wade through this massive ocean of shit for the ending".

Just because you don't have the capacity for puzzle solving, which you admit, doesn't mean it's a bad game, it just makes it ill-suited to your playstyle. It's a critics job to play through it. That's what they're payed for, giving a review to its entirety. He stopped playing probably around the use of the fire minions, he doesn't even mention blue or green, let alone what they do. This suggests he didn't even read the manual. Part of each review should be based on how easily you can get a hang of the game, if he's unwilling to learn. Furthermore, maybe there's some redeeming quality later on, like, I don't know, having access to all the minion types. Simply put, don't even try to back it up unless you're going to play through and make a decent objective review that explains the pros and cons. And then you can throw in why you hate it and the developer should go die in a bush, or whatever drivel you want to add. Maybe The Escapist will pay you instead then.

But, how will playing it through to it's entirety change anything? For GOW, maybe this is me being biased, but I think it's pretty out of place to follow killing a barbarian with the blades of athena with a puzzle sequence. There are people who read the manuals before they run into problems O_O ?

It didn't seem like he didn't get the hang of the game to me, it seemed like the difficulty of the actual game (I consider the minion puzzles to be mini-games within the game ) never went up. Which I admit is his fault, thrice so if he chooses the game he reviews every week .

Playing each game through to the end.....given some games I've played and their horribleness/difficulty .....I would need to know the payment.

 

[The Keeper]

The Pope is lawful evil, huh?

Nice to know that Yahtzee is still a little child at heart. Then again, it's games that he excels in, and not worldly issues.

 

[Taranaich]

Even though I like Overlord 2, I can't disagree with anything Yahtzee mentions in the review save the "it's not as fun being the bad guy when the game tells you to be one" - isn't that the point of Saint's Row 2?

You're a total bastard in SR2, and even if you never kill anyone that isn't shooting you, there are moments in the cutscenes where you're using innocent people as human shields or just running them over. Sure, SR2 is more polished and playable than Overlord 2, but I find it strange to criticize Overlord's "forced evil" and yet praise that exact element in SR2.

Also, the "resurrecting favourite minions" can be useful, as this means you can resurrect high-level minions that have died. It's basically upgrading the minions under the guise of caring about them.

I think Overlord 2 could've benefitted from a lot more personalisation. Few of the minions have any character outside the ones that stay in the lair, it would be nice for there to be slight variations in personality and character beyond just the colour types. Also having the mistresses *do something* - you got to be Overlord of the Bedroom in the first game, in this one, none of that. Dammit.