You kick-off with five brown 'minions' - sharp-toothed, giggling little wretches who take great pleasure in smashing up anyone or anything that gets in their way. As the melee specialists of your gang, these are the guys you want spearheading attacks, although they prove vulnerable to water, fire and toxic gas - something the blue, red and green minions are resistant to, respectively, once they're added to your growing army of miscreants.
Your minions can become extra powerful by mounting other creatures, such as wolves, salamanders and giant spiders. Otherwise insurmountable problems - such as a tightly meshed unit of shielded soldiers - can be barrelled apart by sweeping a pack of mounted wolves into them, while making friends with spiders allows your greens to sidle up walls, activate pressure plates and reach otherwise off-limits areas.
There's also the ability to disguise your happy band of evildoers in enemy garb on a few occasions, with nearby changing tents allowing you to dupe guards into letting you pass. On both counts, Triumph gets around the need to add further control commands by making certain new features context-sensitive, with the player only required to, for example, sweep minions into the tent or onto the mount to activate them.
Elsewhere, firing magic into Possession Stones allows the Overlord to possess a single minion and wander off with a limited number of his chums to investigate part of the level too locked-down, or simply too small, to barge into in standard form. These stealth-lite interludes are an enjoyable change of pace, and because of the small size of the minions, the game zooms down to their level and you end up with a real sense of scale and vulnerability as you sneak past lumbering sentries.
Overlord II feels like a shining beacon of quality. Not only is it a distinct improvement on the original, but the new features add greatly to what was already a superbly entertaining game. It manages to strike an excellent balance between being challenging and rewarding, and does so throughout with a wicked smile on its face. If the original was something of a sleeper hit, then the sequel ought to wake people up to its deliciously evil charms.