Overlord Nitpicks

In his latest article, Twenty Sided’s Shamus Young tells us about some of the shoddy pathfinding that can be encountered during boss fights in Triumph Studios’ Overlord.

Most of the major boss fights and puzzle sections of the game work this way, and the trial-and-error becomes longer and more expensive when you’re dealing with puzzles and you don’t even know which minion type you’re supposed to be using. Since guessing wrong will generally obliterate your forces, puzzles will rapidly burn through a lot of your hard-won energy. You can’t tell what you’re doing wrong, and even when you get it right it doesn’t always feel like the right answer.

I killed several bosses when they got themselves caught on the scenery and I let my reds slowly needle them to death rather than looking for the (real) solution, simply because finding the real solution would have been so expensive in terms of energy.

Once a puzzle is solved, you generally have everything you need to know to beat the guy with minimal losses. You can either re-load the game and do the entire dungeon all over again, or go farm for a while to replenish your lost energy. Either way, you’ve found the answer to the puzzle and now you have to pay off the energy you sank into it. You can pay this off by resetting and replaying previous content, or grinding.