Overlord: Fellowship of Evil

My first impression of Fellowship of Evil was confusion, and not the fun kind. I loaded up what the box effectively promises as a darker, co-op Diablo-style spin on the Overlord formula, and within twenty minutes I was staring at a nearly static combat loop wondering what happened to the series that once had genuine wit and minion strategy baked into every level. The short answer: Codemasters stripped out everything that made the first two Overlord games interesting and replaced it with a top-down isometric hack-and-slash that can't hold a candle to the genre staples it's imitating. You pick one of four Netherghuls, each with a rough character identity: Inferna is the sword-swinging melee bruiser, Hakon is a rogue-type, Cryos is a Dark Elf who leans into area-of-effect attacks, and Malady covers the sorcerer and necromancer angle. On paper, that sounds like decent class variety. In practice, every character plays out as three attacks (light, heavy, special) that never evolve or expand across the entire campaign. There is no meaningful loot chase, no skill tree, no growing arsenal. The minions, which were the soul of the original games, are largely decorative here. Brown, Red, Green, and Blue minion types exist, and the Blue variants spent a chunk of launch in near-broken slow-motion due to bugs. The main tactical ask is routing the correct minion color through color-coded fire traps to hit a switch. That is about as deep as the puzzle layer gets. The campaign runs roughly seven hours and is structured across a prologue and three acts. That runtime sounds merciful given how repetitive the wave-clearing becomes, but the game also wedges in timed obstacle-course race sections between combat waves, a design choice that baffled critics and players alike when it launched. Framerate drops, collision bugs that trap your character in level geometry, and AI that regularly wanders minions into the "Golden" corruption zones (turning them against you through no fault of your own) pile frustration on top of tedium. There is a local and online four-player co-op mode, but the online player base was sparse at launch and is essentially a ghost town now. Co-op also carried its own upgrade-token bugs, meaning progress could simply fail to register for secondary players. The one area critics and players consistently spared from condemnation is the writing. Rhianna Pratchett, who wrote Overlord II, scripted this entry too, and Gnarl's returning narration has the same dry, sardonic energy fans will recognize. The voice acting and music hold up. Those are real bright spots. They are also completely overwhelmed by the surrounding mediocrity. Fellowship of Evil holds a Metacritic score of 24 on PC, and Steam sits at roughly 22 percent positive from over 700 reviews. That consensus is not a review-bombing anomaly; it reflects a genuinely undercooked product that shipped broken and never mounted a meaningful recovery through patches. Worth noting: this remains the last non-racing game Codemasters has released, which probably tells its own story about how the studio processed the fallout.

Alex · Scout Team

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