GC 2008: Overlord Minions First Look

Last week, while visiting the UK en route to this year's Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, we had an opportunity to visit Codemasters' HQ and check out a number of the publisher's upcoming games. Among them was the recently announced Overlord Minions: a puzzle-oriented action game in which you'll control a team of four of the Gremlins-like minions as they carry out an important mission on behalf of their overlord.

Like their counterparts in the original Overlord game, the minions here come in four different flavors: brown, red, green, and blue. These aren't nameless servants carrying out your bidding as part of a sizable horde though; rather, they're an elite "Special Farces" crew named Giblet, Blaze, Stench, and Zap. The minions' abilities are determined by their color, so while Giblet (brown) is great at melee combat, Blaze (red) specializes in ranged attacks and is able to manipulate fire. Blaze can even set alight the toxic farts of Stench who, like other green minions, is an assassin of sorts and immune to poison.

Overlord Minions is viewed from a top-down perspective and can be played exclusively with the stylus. Icons on the right of the touch screen are used to choose which minion or minions you control, and then tapping the screen causes them to follow your stylus. Combat will initiate automatically when it's necessary, but you'll tap the screen to perform special moves, such as Giblet's powerful head-butt.

There will be plenty of combat in the game, but the focus definitely appears to be on puzzles that can only be solved by splitting your team up and using their special abilities in creative ways. For example, you'll be using floor switches to turn hazards on and off, as well as open doors. You'll also light fires and carry around hot embers, as well as freeze enemies and push them around as blocks of ice.

As you progress through each of Overlord Minions' self-contained missions, you'll find plenty of environmental objects to destroy, many of which contain life force or mana. The latter can be saved up and used to call in something resembling an air strike from the overlord, while the former is used to replenish your minions' health. Minions that die can be resurrected at summoning portals scattered throughout each level.

Overlord Minions takes place some years before the events of Overlord, and while we don't know an awful lot about its storyline at this point, we're told that it revolves around a cult known as the Kindred. The cult is attempting to resurrect a race of humanoid-dragon hybrids, and at the end of our demo, we were afforded a look at one of them during a boss battle. The dragon kin in question was half dwarf, but was anything but diminutive in size as it stomped around the sizeable arena in which the battle took place. Rather than tackling the enemy head-on, the minions had to use environmental hazards to their advantage by luring the dragon toward jets of fire and then turning them on, for example.

We look forward to bringing you more information on Overlord Minions between now and its release sometime in 2009.