Overlord: Raising Hell (DLC)

Overlord: Raising Hell bundles the base Overlord game with its Raising Hell DLC expansion, and if you slept on this one back in 2008, here is the pitch: you are the bad guy, you know you are the bad guy, and the game is completely fine with that. You command squads of goblin-like minions across a warped fantasy world, each minion type serving a distinct tactical role. Browns brawl up close, reds lob fireballs from range, blues provide a rough healing function for the group, and greens go invisible for sneaky flanking. Juggling those four types in combat is the actual game, and it holds up better than you might expect from something this old. The humor is the other engine driving this thing. The world is a deliberate parody of high fantasy tropes, with corrupt heroes who turned fat and lazy after saving the world, peasants who are barely worth protecting, and a tone that sits somewhere between Pratchett and a Saturday morning cartoon villain origin story. The writing is not Disco Elysium-tier layered prose, but it commits hard to the bit. You will genuinely chuckle at the setup for most zones, and the "corruption" system means your choices tilt the story toward different shades of sinister rather than giving you a good-or-evil binary. You can be cartoonishly destructive or quietly, efficiently cruel. Both feel rewarding. The Raising Hell DLC adds the Abyss realms, reworked versions of existing areas tuned toward higher difficulty and some additional lore payoff. It is more of the same, which is either a selling point or a warning depending on how much the base loop grabbed you. If you burned out in the third chapter, the DLC will not reignite that. If you loved directing your brown minions to throw explosive barrels at confused civilians, it absolutely delivers more of that. Where the game earns its roast: the camera is a relic, the puzzle design occasionally telegraphs solutions so obviously it borders on insulting, and there are fetch-quest stretches in the middle act that exist purely to pad out the run time. Build variety is shallow compared to modern ARPGs. Your Overlord levels up, you acquire new spells and minion upgrades, but there is not a deep theorycrafting layer here. This is a mid-2000s action RPG, and the mechanics reflect that era honestly. For who it is actually worth picking up: players who enjoy the idea of a third-person action game where resource management and squad tactics take priority over personal combat skill, fans of comedic fantasy who want something lighter than BG3 but weirder than most genre contemporaries, and anyone who never got around to this during its original release window. The Steam reviews sitting at 93 percent positive across a solid sample size suggest the nostalgia read is broadly correct, and first-timers tend to bounce off it or love it quickly, so an hour in you will know. The minion physics alone might be worth the price of admission.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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