I went in excited, and I liked the novelty at first. As the game went on my score dropped and at end I just sighed.
That's where the positives end however. The story of getting your turf back is a big cliche and all the characters are paper thin. The humor has very few moments that made me even chuckle, usually in embarrassement of how bad it was. Most of the humor is just sad and terrible. The Dark Lord is fighting against lazy Roman slobs who practice slavery and use light magic for twisted means - who is the villain afterall? *Sigh*. The other faction are forest elves, who are cliched hippies whining how nature must be preserved with all its cute and hideous creatures, sometimes ending up being eaten by the same creature. Some boring animal bosses and the human ones don't make any more sense.
Gameplay is even worse. It's a sort of adventure game with RTS elements in which you walk down linear paths. As the Dark Lord you can attack with a weapon and use a couple of spells, but the Lord is a pushover. The meat of the game is commanding your goblin army. They are exactly like Gremlins, trying to be evil but ending up goofy and sometimes even cute. There are a couple of variants, with their very limited skills. The problem is however that their A.I. sucks. Half the time they end up not doing what I wanted, for example when I tell them to stay put some of them sometimes follow me anyway. Sometimes the issues even leave you stuck. On a few occassions you need to order your gremlins to carry a bomb to a blockade. However rarely the gremlin simply ignites the bomb and runs away, making the bomb explode without opening up the blockade. As there are no more bombs you need to backtrack all the way back to previous area and come back so the bombs will be back, as will the enemies unless you have reached a checkpoint. The other issue with minions is managing them. With the very limited buttons and real-time gameplay you can forget about using every variant as they're meant to, it's just better to order the entire horde to attack anyone they can. Often you try to move the camera, but the same stick also moves around your horde and your camera fixes on them. Atleast your minions can level up and they can get some cool mounts.
The minion AI is not the end of annoyances. The game world has a snow region with a town, a jungle region with a town, the Empire City and the Dark Tower, with the quests boiling down to "Capture or Destroy each city". Besides the chaotic and dull combat there are some puzzles, and upgrades you need to acquire. Another issue is when you run out of Lifeforce to spawn minions, which means you're stuck and need to go back to harvest more, which can be a painfully slow process. Not to mention there are many instant death scenes, usually involving a group of enemy bowmen - you stumble upon their sights and the Dark Lord is dead within a second. Absolutely ridicilous.
And that's still not the end of issues. Even though the game world is small, you could use a map, but it's downright unusable. Back at the Dark Tower you can have mistresses, decorate the tower, buy upgrades for the Lord or revive your dead minions, who usually are at higher level with better gear they have looted. Unfortunately all of those things are shallow and pointless, having 10 level 1 gremlins is better than sacrificing 10 gremlins to get a single level 3 badass-looking gremlin.
Summary: The game is simply terrible in all areas. There was some potential playing as bad guy and commanding an army, and the minions are fun, but it's all for nothing. Story is uninteresting and irritating, graphics look grainy and lack detail, gameplay is unstable and unrewarding. They even managed to include split-screen multiplayer, but atleast for me both screens show the same player with the other one being completely lost. Codemasters, stick to driving games.
*
2/10
Wishes: This brand is very much a lost cause. The concept is decent, but everything needs to be changed. Easier just to forget all about the series.