The game does get more strategically interesting as you progress, especially once you master setting guard flags (I’ve yet to get up to unlocking the blue minions).

Overlord II also doesn’t remain strictly linear. More so than the first, you can travel to places you’ve already visited to harvest gold and life-force, and the odd new area to explore or mini-quest appears, to distract you from the main quest line.

Then there’s decorating your tower, and appeasing your mistress(es).

So far there have been a few frustrating moments, such as deaths in the latter areas of some levels where I had to traipse through the same cleared areas repeatedly.

Also I found some tasks annoyingly hard, where I was forced to use the analog stick to remotely guide minions under a time limit. Seemed easy, but I was fighting the controls, which is always annoying.

One point to note, make sure you have lots of life force spare before resurrecting minions. I wasted a lot of minion life force resurrecting a few higher level minions, such that the game sacrificed a number of the medium level minions that were still useful, and I was suddenly left with a smaller minion army… of erm… small minions.

It’s no problem going out to harvest more life force, though that process can feel a bit grindy and repetitive after a while – something I recall doing a few times in the original.

Overall though, Overlord II is as much fun as the first, and I’m looking forward to playing it some more as well.

“For the Master!”