War for the Overworld: I wrote a review so I'm going to copy and past it if that's okay.
I'm going to level with you, I'm writing this review just after the game crashed on level 4 for the fifth time. I was going to try to finish the game's campaign before I gave a review, but apparently that's not going to be possible.
War for the Overworld has a lot of promise, but unfortunately that's all it brings to the table. Hardcore fans of Dungeon Keeper will reminisce over the top down view of the game, and the charmingly cute demon and cultist horde that you command, but they are the only people that will appreciate the game. Overworld has its moments that shine, but they are overshadowed by the fact that it is incomplete.
The game follows you as a recently awakened Underlord, being taught by the narrator to regain your full power. Your lowest caste minions- the worker- mine blocks to make space for your various 3 x 3 rooms that allow you to recruit certain types of more powerful minions. These minions vary from researcher cultists, cannon fodder gnarling warriors, mindless beasts, and fire breathing chunder blacksmiths. All your minions require certain amenities for you to properly lord over them; lairs for them to sleep in, slaughter pen's to feed them, and the tavern to entertain them. You also have to build vault tiles to increase your gold total. The game also allows you to build defenses by placing a blueprint on a tile you control, although my workers would never build my blueprints, and would ignore my commands to do so.
Story
The story-, up to the point that I played, is laughably simple. Humans are the bad guys and you need to kill them all because you're a demon Underlord and you hate them. The names and personalities of the human champions that you kill are fairly unremarkable, and easily forgettable. They will occasionally yell things at you from their bases, but it's mostly a tool to let you know they're going to attack soon.
Gameplay
The gameplay has a few faults. When you command your minions to rally to an area or attack, some of them will run back and forth in a seemingly random pattern, attacking enemies and then dashing away, which can make for a very boring and frustrating fight.
The lack of control over minions (besides possession, which I never ended up using) makes you feel more like a babysitter watching over unruly kids than an Underlord. The spell system works decently well, although you can't use any of your offensive obilities on tiles you don't control. The tile patterns to the map were seemingly random, and I found it incredibly frustrating when I only needed one more block to make a 3x3 room, but it wasn't possible with the layout of the map. Much of the tutorial made sense, but when I saved my game and then loaded back into it, I would have progressed to the point where I saved, but the tutorial for that map would restart.
The workers are 90% of the reason I started shouting profanities at my computer. These idiots just refuse to listen, and the rally system with both the workers and armies is just plain ridiculous. Having to create an impasse rally point ( a marker that workers can't pass) is just lazy. If you don't place an impasse flag, the workers will continue to expand your influence into the enemies base, and in near-lemmings style, be slaughtered by the enemies' defenses and warriors. Better controls, like a marquee tool to specify where you want your workers and army to go, is what the game needs to be much more playable.
User Interface
The UI for War for the Overworld looks pretty at a glance, and I really liked the simplicity of the icons for the spells, units, and rooms. Certain icons, like the worker rally flag, were incredibly hard to click, and the hover indicator showing when you were on top of the icon just wouldn't work sometimes. The same applies to the announcements on the right side of the page. The icons for the announcement bar are too small, and they aren't intuitive enough to know what each one means without hovering over it. I ended up hiding the bar pretty quickly, since it offered very little for me to look at anyway. The space that the sin meter takes up is far too large, since you'll accidentally click on it when trying to build rooms. The map is strange to understand, as east is up, south is right, west is down, and north is left.
Artificial Intelligence
The AI for Overworld is fairly simple. The minions you control will run like lambs to the slaughter towards any rally point you make. What I didn't realize, and which wasn't explained to me in the tutorial, is that minions will not do their secondary tasks while a rally point is active. It makes sense, but it was never made clear that your minions need to be in a passive state to do research and train. The enemy AI is much like yours, they will attack and run away, and occasionally a human worker would wander into my base, and get killed instantly.
In Conclusion
War for the Overworld is not finished, plain and simple. It feels as though more time was taken developing jokes for the narrator to say randomly throughout the campaign than programming a better UI. I don't care that one of my minions is French.
The developers are active in updating the game, and I expect it to improve with time, but it is unacceptable to release a game so unfinished that you can't get through two hours of gameplay without it crashing. The minions act about as confused and scared as I was playing this game. Underneath the crashes and bugs, there is a glimpse of promise, but it is not worth my time and yours right now. I hope that War for the Overworld gets fixed, but I won't be returning to it until it does.
+Shows Promise
+Charming, funny narrator
-Unfinished
-Buggy
-Bad AI
5/10