Overlord (PC)

Overlord (2007)

This is a first person fantasy game where you are the overlord, master of goblin-like creatures called minions. You start the game with brown minions waking you up from your evil slumber on a sarcophagus with a steel helmet, armor and axe. There are four types of minions. The brown minions are your standard melee attackers and are available in the start of the game. The red minions are the ranged fighters, hurling fireballs at enemies and can survive on fires (can extinguish them as well). The green minions are your stealth assassins, when grouped (flagged) they can become invisible and can back stab enemies within their range while the enemy is looking away from them, as well as survive poisonous areas and can disable poison producing plants that block the overlord's path. The blue minions are the support creatures, they can resurrect fallen minions and can swim/traverse water but are weak fighters (but can swarm an enemy and resurrect the fallen comrades if some will die).

You start with only five minions that you can summon but the maximum number of minions can be increased by collecting creature objects or by upgrading your helmet on the forge. Minions can only be summoned on summoning pits: browns are summoned on brown summoning pits, reds on red summoning pits, etc. Your tower is your headquarters, where all the tower objects are placed like creature, health and magic objects as well as creature hives. In order to summon creatures of a certain type, you must acquire their hive.

Weapons, armors and helmets can be created on a forge somewhere within the tower but first you must acquire the steel forge and command your creatures to carry it to the nearest teleporter to your tower. You can also upgrade your equipment on the forge, sacrificing minions to give it additional damage, power and abilities. For armors, you can sacrifice green minions to give it health regeneration, with a percentage depending on the number of green minions you sacrifice. Brown minions increase the armor's defense, red minions increase your maximum life bars and blue minions increase your magic capacity. You can get two other forge types as well which increase the maximum number of minions you can sacrifice to give your battle equipment more abilities.

Although you can summon a limited number of minions (from you current maximum summons), you will have a pool of available minions that you can summon to replenish your ranks which reside in your tower. You can increase your minion pool by gathering lifeforce. Sheeps that you or your minions kill will generate brown lifeforce (with a yellow color) and is the most common. Red lifeforce from certain creatures/enemies will increase your red minion pool, green lifeforce for greens and blue lifeforce for blues. There is also an arena in your tower where you can battle previously encountered enemies, very useful for filling up your creature pools because these arena enemies will drop lifeforce. The bugs are a perfect arena combatants as they drop lifeforce depending on the species and I would suggest you try to find these bugs in the game to make them available in the arena as soon as possible. The battler beetles drop brown lifeforce, the magma beetles drop red lifeforce, the puff beetles drop green lifeforce and the dazzler beetles drop blue lifeforce for a total of 75 lifeforces in every arena battle with a specific bug.

---spoilers---
Now on to the summary of the game storyline. You were actually a gallant knight who once fought an evil overlord along with your other hero comrades. You were left for dead in the last overlord's tower after that overlord was defeated by the other heroes. The leader of the heroes was a wizard who was determined to stop the overlord's evil reign. Unknown to all, the wizard was possessed by this overlord in their battle and all came to believe that the overlord is dead. The wizard then corrupted the other heroes and the new overlord (you), the knight left for dead in the tower was resurrected/awaken to take over the overlord's tower temporarily which the wizard planned in taking back later. You will battle all of your corrupted hero friends and finally meet the wizard who you must defeat to remain the tower's current overlord, your minions will battle against his minions and prove yourself to be the best overlord. In the end, the minion jester who you beat up in the training sessions and kick around in your tower will give an evil grin with eyes glowing, probably possessed by the overlord wizard.

There is also Overlord: Raising Hell expansion which I plan on acquiring.