Overlord: Minions is Codemasters' DS follow-up to the original Overlord from 2007 but it sadly falls short of the fun of the original. Could it be the less than perfect control system of dragging the stylus to control the minions or the incredibly linear storyline that is extremely lacking of the wonderful humor from the original? It's probably both, and then some.

The story is similar to the original game, but instead of playing as an all-powerful "OverLord", you take the part of the wildly incompetent “elite” minions. The levels are made up of very simple puzzles - mostly kill everything and walk a simpleton minion up a narrow ledge to push a button. There are still four types of minions, each one useful at some point of the game, but you lose the fun of hitting the “Kill Everything” button, because you are too busy frantically sliding the stylus over the screen while the minion happily swings his weapon in the wrong direction.

The visual style is very JRPG, with the top screen displaying the story and character reactions during plot sequences or a map during normal gameplay.  Speaking of gameplay, that left something to be desired.  It's full of short levels and very easy puzzles that left me wondering if the developers simply got lazy. Granted, it is a DS game, and most of the games developed for it are for “casual” gaming.  But the overall simplicity of the game made me wish Codemasters would have just went fully casual.  Even a Tetris-like minion squishing game would have been at least a definite direction.

As for the controls, dragging the stylus around to guide the minions, while it works in theory, can and often does lead to a glitched minion who doesn't respond. This happened to me far more than it should have. I was also very disappointed in the lack of any voice acting. No more was the Head Minion going to give me hints in his sinister voice, nor was I was going to hear the idiot jester minion, who is depressingly absent from the game; no kicking him around for me. You are also missing the wonderful power-tripping joy of hearing your minions yell, “For the Master!” when you send them running into battle.

The music tries to make up for this by being a super-perky semi-epic style that didn't really fit in the game, and at times made me think a boss monster was around the corner for me to kill. A saving point of the game might have been a co-op mode, but since there isn't one, or any sort of online play, or downloadable content, I guess I can just sit and be disappointed.

Easy-to-access multiplayer has always been a major selling point of the DS; most of the DS games I play have a multi-player mode, and not taking advantage of this functionality is a sore point. Overall the game feels very rushed, like the designers really wanted to cash in on the console-port-to-portable-games market. The original would never work on the DS, so they created this sub-par game that's filled with fluff and none of the amusing humor or story of the original Overlord.