Overlord Minions Hands-On

It's clear that June is officially Overlord month, with three games across three platforms all arriving in a few weeks' time. We checked them out at publisher Codemasters' E3 booth, focusing on Overlord Minions on the Nintendo DS.

Overlord Minions can be thought of as a side quest to the upcoming Wii title, happening alongside the story of that particular game. Codemasters promises that there will be a lot of subtle hints to the first game and the Wii game in Overlord Minions, but it won't be necessary to have played them to get the most out of it.

You control four minions using the stylus and the touch screen--no other controls are needed to play the game. The minions include Giblet, Blaze, Stench, and Zap, and they each have different abilities that can work together. Stench, for example, can let off green noxious gas, while Blaze can then set it on fire to kill enemies.

You control your minions by touching the stylus in the direction you want them to go, and then swipe across enemies to make them attack. A menu on the right of the screen lets you highlight multiple minions at a time, or split them up to solve puzzles. In the early level that we played, Zap, the blue minion, was able to swim across water to push over bridges, while Giblet was much stronger at beating up enemies.

The script has once again been provided by Rihanna Pratchett, who has worked on all the Overlord games to date. The visual style is much more cartoony on the DS than in the original game, but it still suits the world, and the humor seems to have made it intact. Sadly, there won't be a multiplayer mode because the team wanted to focus on delivering the best single-player experience possible. We won't have to wait long to find out if they achieved their goal: Overlord Minions is due out on June 23 in Europe and on June 26 in the US.