Being evil is easy. Letting players unleash their will and make them laugh at the same time? Now that's the hard part.

Overlord says, "Go on then. Be the most evil bastard on the planet, and we promise we won't punish you." Killing witnesses and hoarding stash can lead to side quests like kidnapping women to create your very own harem. Since all these evil deeds unlock so many cool options, doing the 'right' becomes a challenge.

Having said that Overlord isn't really all about the overlord. Of course, you can purchase weaponry and do all sorts of things, but your gang of sadistic minions steal the show. They'll attack targets, loot or move objects and if you're running low on health, they will willingly sacrifice themselves to restore you.

The Evil-licious tactics do eventually come into play and with new minion types: Blues act as healers, reds pass fireballs and greens take care of stealth.

The only problem is that you need finer controls than the mouse-keyboard setup offers on the PC. Playing battles featuring simultaneous attacks from your antihero and a gremlin horde is much easier when using a gamepad. Like many standard titles of today, Overlord maps its controller layout to the ultra-ubiquitous Xbox 360 pad-left stick moves the master while the right stick gives total control of the minions. So if you don't already own the pad, add that to the price tag.

Overlord has one weak point though, it's enemy A.I is somewhat annoying. Maybe it is intentional; maybe they're supposed to slow the game down for tactics-but I ain't buying it. I almost lost track of how many times I voluntarily restarted from a checkpoint to keep one ugly gremlin alive. Then again, any game that actually makes me WANT to restart -rather than making me HAVE to restart-can't be all that bad.