While moral choice systems are the feature du jour for contemporary games, there has been a curious lack of games that allow players to play as the villain, especially in recent times. Characters in various open-world crime games such as Grand Theft Auto are certainly despicable, being vicious, violent criminals (especially the “hero” of Saints Row 2), but even then, the player is not implied to be villainous, diabolical, or really evil, terms usually reserved to describe the antagonists in superhero fiction.
The original Overlord was one of those games, casting the player as a rising (or falling) star in the world of evil, out to depose the hypocritical adventurers that did in his predecessor. It garnered attention and praise for its novelty (to those too young to remember Evil Genius, Syndicate or Dungeon Keeper) and charming aesthetic, twisting traditional stereotypes to make being an evil overlord a good thing to be. The affair was flawed, though, as it ultimately cast the player as more of an antihero, forcing him to actually liberate territories in his quest to topple the former heroes, which were even more evil than the player, unwillingly serving the greater good and undermining the concept of being super-duper evil. Does Overlord II manage to do proper justice to injustice?
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