Overlord was one of those franchises like Viking that cropped up early in the generation. It had a few issues as many games usually do with consoles early in their lifetimes, but the overall concept I thought was quite good, and have enjoyed both games in the series a great deal.
for those that came into the gen later, and maybe are not aware of what Overlord might be : Overlord is a fantasy hack and slash crossed with some lite rts elements in the form of minions that you control in packs. Players takes the role of a resurrected warrior known simply as The Overlord who has control over hordes of gremlin-like creatures known as "minions". The player must defeat seven corrupt ruling heroes in order to reconquer the lands and establish his lordship over its inhabitants. The game features a corruption feature, similar to that of the Fable games, but allowing the player to "be evil... or really evil,"where certain actions and choices affect different aspects of the story and gameplay. While the Overlord is controlled in a third person perspective, the way minions are controlled brings elements of real time strategy and upgrades bring those of role-playing games. The game also uses black humour and is often a satire and parody of the traditional fantasy setting and plot
Overlord was one of my early favorites of the gen, and I thought Codemasters had alot of really good ideas for the series. It had a few issues that hurt some peoples enjoyment of it, for instance the first game featured no in game mini map, the controls took some getting used to, and sometimes your minions would do things that you did not intend ( i kind of liked this though since they would do some very funny stuff).
This is another of those franchises that I wish could have lived on, as the sequel did improve quite a bit, but the humor could be alittle heavy handed at times and would sometimes feel abit forced, or flat as a result.
I loved the world though, and thought that the overall art direction was good, although I can understand why some might feel that the games premise would be better served with a darker world I felt that the art direction actually made for a good setup for the Overlord taking over and corrupting the world through domination. I also always found it pretty funny in most cases that the "Heroes" the Overlord was sent to destroy usually ended up not exactly being very "heroic" in their personality types.
I know Codemasters has basically become a racing only company for the most part, but i'd love to see a third game in the series at some point, maybe even in the next generation. I know thats mostly a pipedream now though, still we have the first two, and even with their issues they are alot of fun, and i'd recommend them because I know many never got into them because of late adoption of the current consoles, and because both games are super cheap now. I have not jumped back into the Multiplayer so I don't know what they looked like in terms of people playing.