You start the game with the ability to control a maximum of 5 brown (warrior) minions. You will not be able to summon other types just yet. As the game progresses, you will increase your powers and will be able to summon all four types of minions and control a swarm of not less than 50 minions. The fact that you choose how many minions you'd like from each type adds a lot to the gameplay. You will have to choose wisely in order to overcome the various obstacles and puzzles that game will place in your way.
Having said that, I still feel the puzzles could be a little more challenging, given the resources the developers had in their hands. The game tries to prevent the player from thinking too much, I guess for the sake of the action. Not a bad decision, but puzzles could be a little tougher in my opinion.
You can summon your minions using spawning pits, which can be found in every level. The price you need to pay for this action is what the game calls life force. Every living thing leaves behind life force once you killed it. That includes sheep, beetles, hobbits, peasants and so on. You need to gather this force, which looks like a shining colorful ball, in order to spawn more minions. Minions are so loyal to you that they'll sacrifice their own lives in order to help you regenerate your health or mana. There are special altars scattered around the levels in which you can sacrifice them.
Using the left click, you can send your minions to complete a task. Right click to call them back and follow you. For instance, send them towards a group of enemies and they'll attack, send them towards a table full of food and ale, and they'll tear the place up while eating and drinking in between, getting drunk and confused for a few moments. Watching them smashing through pumpkin patches, storming towards your enemies and destroying everything that stands in their way while shouting and giggling, is just pure joy. Too bad not everything in the environment is destructible.
They will also arm themselves with whatever they can find laying around, so seeing a goblin wearing a pumpkin as a helmet and using a frying pan as a weapon is not something rare here. Your minions will pick up anything valuable and bring it to you, so you don't need to worry about forgetting gold coins, life force, equipment or anything else in the battlefield.
You can also choose certain types of goblins within your group in order to use them for a specific task. For instance, you encounter a group of enemies, what do you do? Select reds and send them to high ground to use their ranged attack. Send your browns towards the enemy while directing the greens to attack from the back. While all are in the heat of the battle, prepare your blues and send them to drag bodies outside of your enemy's reach in order to resurrect them.
To achieve such actions as I described above, you must use both left and right buttons while escorting your minions' movement with the mouse to direct them to the desired destination. This is too complicated and not exactly the best way to control the minions, a weird choice by the developers. Add in the fact that you need to control both yourself and your minions at the same time, and you get a pretty hard control scheme, which will take some time getting used to. Not impossible, but it could be implemented in a more convenient way.
Why not, for instance, let us select minions by clicking them and then point them where we want them to go on the battlefield, just like in RTS games. I guess the main reason for this control scheme is the fact that Overlord was ported from the Xbox360...
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