Dark Legend skilfully brings the core mechanics of the series to the Wii but suffers from a lack of ambition.
I was actually more excited about this game than Overlord 2. I hoped it would be like links awakening, cut down but leaving the good stuff. In one important regard it does deliver, the core mechanics of overlord are carried over and handle nice on the Wii controls with a bit of practice. You've got your four minion types, you sweep them around put them in guard points, all the usual stuff. It's nice and responsive. There are a a couple of embellishments, like throttling where you grab a minion throttle them and send them off to explode. It doesn't add much and after the first few times where you have to use it to get past obstacle I never used it again.
For that matter I had to use very little of my arsenal of options. There are a few set pieces where you have to split forces but other than that moving all your minions together on a guard point wins fights. You have a selection of spells, I don't actually know what most do. I tried a few but I really didn't need them. This game gets around the other Overlord games tendency to be fiddly by being so easy you don't need to do much fiddly stuff.
So Dark Legends is easy, it's also short. I played through in two hefty sittings. It's probably about 8 hours total. I don't actually think that's too bad a length. The presentation, linearity and scale is something I quite like about this game. It certainly doesn't wear out its welcome.
I think my greatest disappointment is the story. The start of the game gives an interesting set up of a young overlord and small cast of characters which seems promising but then it doesn't go anywhere with it. There are no character interactions where the fact the main characters is young makes a difference, in fact there is almost no character interactions. There are no opportunities to do evil. It's all straight forward go here, kill this, now go here. There are a few fun set pieces plays on fairy tales.
One of the most annoying problems I had with this game was lock ups. In my one play through it locked three times, twice at the same point.
Really it feels the problem is lack of ambition. Given that it's a scaled down game I was hoping for a shorter but more polished experience. I was hoping that the set up meant the gap in volume of content would be made up by focusing on the characters. In the end though it seems Climax was satisfied for Dark Legend to be just a cut down Overlord game.
This game belongs in the bargain bin. The thing is I don't mean that in bad way, well not entirely. While it lasts it is fun but there just isn't enough to the game to justify a full price tag. This is exactly what I look for in a cheap game though, something I can play for a while, have some fun with and get some closure.
I'm sure the price on this game is going to drop quickly, when it does this game is worth buying.