The Darkness is a remarkable action game that tells a compelling story from start to finish.

The Darkness. You work best when you're in the shadows, it's a grisly and occasionally gruesome tale, and it also happens to be the name of the demon festering inside of you. Yes, for multiple reasons, The Darkness is a perfect name for this first-person shooter from 2K and Starbreeze, the developer responsible for The Chronicles of Riddick. Based on a comic book from Top Cow, The Darkness weaves an interesting and authentic tale of mobsters seeking revenge together with an otherworldly force with an insatiable appetite for human hearts.

The game opens with an amazing set piece that gets things moving right away. You play as Jackie Estacado, a New York-based mob hit man on his 21st birthday, and you've just woken up in the back of a speeding convertible. A money-collection deal has gone wrong, your two buddies are attempting to get away from crooked cops, and you apparently got knocked out somewhere along the way. As you're speeding along to a construction site to take out the foreman, you're tossed a shotgun to help defend the car from incoming fire. The car crashes, you end up on foot, and the story begins to unfold. Your Uncle Paulie, the leader of the crime family, has gone off the deep end, suspects you of foul play, and puts a hit out on you. So it's on you to tear apart his operation by taking out key moneymakers and money movers. As you do this, Paulie starts to hit back, sending thugs not only in your direction, but also in the direction of Jenny, Jackie's girlfriend and the only person that really matters to him. Luckily, you won't have to fight it out all by yourself.

Who would have thought that mixing mobsters with demons would work so well?

Early in the game, Jackie is possessed by The Darkness, some sort of parasitic creature that speaks to you as a demonic voice in your head and manifests itself as two demonic snakelike appendages that shoot out of your shoulder blades and appear on the sides of the screen. They snap and growl when you whip them out, and over time you'll earn new abilities. For starters, revealing The Darkness gives you a shield against damage, better vision in low-light situations, and a move that lets you plant one of the snakelike creatures onto the ground and take control of it. From there, you can crawl into ventilation ducts, sneak around, and kill enemies with a bite attack. You'll also earn a demon arm attack, which causes a big, sharp appendage to thrust outward and through your enemies. Eventually you'll get guns that use The Darkness' energy as ammo and a black hole attack that lets you open up big vacuums that suck enemies in, killing them quite easily in the process. The catch is that The Darkness has a limited amount of power, and all of these attacks drain it. It's restored automatically when you're standing in shadows, making shooting out light sources wherever you go a pretty big part of the game.

You'll select your darkness powers much like you'll cycle through your conventional weapons, with a touch of the D pad. There aren't very many different types of guns in the game, and what's more, the dual pistols that you start with are also the most effective weapon from start to finish. You'll get a shotgun, assault rifles, and an auto-shotgun that isn't accurate enough to be of much use. The game's auto-targeting seems to make your aim naturally gravitate toward the heads of your foes, and one shot from a pistol is almost always enough to take care of them. Considering the artificial intelligence isn't always swift enough to duck and cover, the game usually isn't too much of a challenge on its medium difficulty setting.

While you'll have the opportunity to go on a few side missions, the main storyline is where all the action is.

Most of the game takes place in New York, and despite its world being reasonably open-ended, the story itself is strictly linear. You'll always know where to go next, and you'll have a good idea of how to get there. If you end up lost, an objectives menu will point you in the general direction, and a map will show you which sections you'll have to travel through. Along the way, particularly in the game's two active subway stations, you'll run into people in need of a little help. This gives you some side missions to play with, and most of these seem to involve going somewhere and shooting and/or talking to someone. They're usually not very difficult, and there isn't really much of a payoff, either. You'll usually get one of the 100 pieces of bonus content, which gives you a few issues of the comic books, as well as plenty of concept art. Unless you're a sucker for concept art or an Xbox 360 achievements fiend, most of the extra stuff can be safely skipped, though the world looks so nice that you might find yourself wanting to complete as much as possible just to spend more time with the game. The main storyline definitely has some length to it, though, so even if you ignore all of the extra little elements, you'll still feel like you got your money's worth out of the game. Thanks to a handful of especially mind-blowing sequences and well-crafted plot twists, you'll feel like you've covered a ton of ground by the time you reach the game's final confrontation.

Insomniac Games Recognized as “Best Company” for Third-Straight Year

Today, Insomniac Games, creators of Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction and Resistance: Fall of Man for PLAYSTATION 3, is proud to announce that for the third-straight year it has been recognized as being the first and only videogames company named to the “50 Best Small & Medium Sized Companies to Work for in America” list.

For 2007, the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) has placed Insomniac 8th in the small companies category. Insomniac Games is the only company in the history of the small business category to earn a Top 10 ranking for three-straight years, remains the first and only videogames developer included on the list, and is the only company in the “TV, Film and Video” category to be recognized this year. The rankings were announced before an estimated audience of 15,000 at the SHRM 59th Annual Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas.

“Last year was among the most challenging in Insomniac’s history as we prepared to release Resistance: Fall of Man worldwide with the launch of PLAYSTATION 3,” said Ted Price, Insomniac Games’ founder and CEO. “Yet we delivered a top-rated and top-selling game -- on time -- while retaining our top-10 ranking as one of the best small companies to work for in America. Therefore, it’s especially gratifying to demonstrate again that it’s possible in the games industry to achieve excellent results while maintaining a collaborative and stimulating workplace culture.”

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Impressions

Earlier today, at its Summer Preview event in San Francisco, Electronic Arts showed off the latest Nintendo Wii version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It was only a few weeks ago that we last saw the game in action, but today's presentation still afforded us an opportunity to check out some new stuff and to see that progress has been made.

Unlike the build of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that we saw last time, this one didn't feature any of the usual cheats and debug options that are used to show off later areas, and so the Hogwarts that we were shown looked much as it will the first time you play the game. The school didn't look radically different, but there were a large number of locked doors with signs on them that, while not particularly pleasing to the eye, will save you the bother of trying and failing to get through them. We also noticed that most of the animated portraits, which we previously learned will offer quests and unlock shortcuts for you, were asleep, perhaps because you'll only be able to use their shortcuts to get to areas that you've already visited using more conventional means.

As we mentioned in our previous preview, Hogwarts is a large and confusing building that will certainly take a while for you to learn your way around. The promised navigation assistance option that will let you follow footprints to your chosen destination has now been implemented, and we're pleased to report that it appears to do its job both admirably and unobtrusively. After setting your destination, you'll notice a set of five or six dark footprints appearing at your feet and pointing you in the right direction--they vanish when you walk the right way but reappear anytime you stray from the most direct route to where you want to be.

We got to see a number of Harry's "charm" spells (as opposed to combat spells) being used during today's presentation, including accio (pull), depulso (push), reparo (repair), reducto (blast), wingardium leviosa (object levitation), and incendio (fire). Additional spells will be unlocked as you progress through the game, and we learned tonight that the pause menu will feature an option that reminds you which gestures you need to make to cast them. None of the gestures that we saw today were complicated--reparo is performed by making a clockwise circle motion, for example--but it's good to know that trial and error won't be your only option if you forget which gestures do what.

Our presentation came to an end in the area of Hogwarts known as the transfiguration courtyard, where Harry challenged a student from a rival house to a game of gobstones. A lot like marbles, gobstones challenges you to knock colored stones out of a chalk circle while keeping yours inside it. On the Wii, gobstones will be played simply by positioning the camera so that it's pointing in the direction that you want to roll your stone and then flicking the Wii Remote while holding and then releasing the B button. The minigame--which is one of three, the others being exploding snap and wizard chess--looked like it will make for a fun distraction from the regular game, and we're looking forward to checking the other minigames and bringing you more information on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix just as soon as we get our hands on a copy.

Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom Q&A

When Blueside Studios announced last year that the next games in its Kingdom Under Fire series would be an action-oriented role-playing game rather than a real-time strategy sequel, many fans were quick to express their disappointment on message boards and forums. Of course, very little was known about Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom at that time, but with every new morsel of information that's released, it seems that more of the series' faithful are converted. Blueside Studios takes player feedback very seriously, as director Henry Lee explained to us during a recent interview.

GameSpot: How has development been going since the last time we saw the game?

Henry Lee: We're onto the final brushing-up/composition stage. It's almost literally evolving into a whole new, different game each day. Especially on the visual side, it's become a lot better than how it looked during the early phases.

GS: What did you think of user feedback to your announcement?

HL: Well, the most singular, prominent piece of feedback we received was, "Awww, why can't I command hordes of troops this time?" It was a bit of a shock to realize that there are so many people out there who still enjoy our previous games…more than we imagined, especially "Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders."

In Circle of Doom you'll control a single character rather than an army.

Although you don't get to control hordes of troops this time, the game will still keep you on your toes. This time, you will be controlling a single character (in the case of multiplayer mode, up to four players can form a party) who has to face hordes of enemies that rush in to pound you to death. And they will come at you from every possible angle--from the ground, the ceiling, underground. Some will even pop out of walls and shrubs to ambush you, while dozens of enemies will fire arrows and dodge in formations, cast different magic spells to hinder your attacks, and the melee types will rush in quickly to take you down. The massiveness of the previous KUF series is still there; it's just that this time, you will have to face that massiveness with only your own character. Multiplayer games will be a bit easier due to co-op, but it will still be a tough challenge. Oh, and did I mention that with the enemies, it's a fight until the death? They won't be giving up, so in other words, winner is last man standing, and it better be you.

GS: Has development been affected by the initial fan feedback?

HL: Since Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom takes a detour from the KUF franchise's RTS roots, we are focusing on delivering a whole new gaming experience while maintaining the grand scale that has been our signature throughout the series. Of course, some of the fan feedback was much more suited for implementation to a massive RTS, so we decided to use them in our next title, (I'm not sure if I can officially announce its name yet, sorry), which will be a traditional KUF-style RTS. We're really excited by the fact that there has been so much great feedback and suggestions that made a huge impact not just on the development of Circle of Doom, but also on the development of our next title. As always, it's surprising how many innovative ideas the fans can deliver to us and how much of it really does get implemented. So keep on sending those suggestions!

GS: How much have the previous games influenced this one?

It's not hard to figure out why the heroes are hoping to escape the Dark Dimension.

HL: Well, it is still a highly magical place, if not more so. Spell-like powers are abundant, and the main characters are all from the previous series (some go way back to the first KUF for the PC). Plus, the storyline for this game is a link from The Crusaders to the next KUF title. Many of the heroes that the fans have loved through the ages (pun intended) will come back--albeit in a slightly changed, different form. They're all trapped in the Dark Dimension, and all will have compelling reasons to return to the Age of Light, where the world of Bersia is about to face the most horrendous fate yet. And this will be directly linked to the next title's story arc and plot, of course. You will be able to play as previous favorites, including Celine the Elf Archer Queen (if you know who this is, you're probably one of the old-timer fans that we love), Kendal the Ecclesian Knight, and others. Players will finally get to know the inner turmoil and challenges that some of their favorite characters face.

GS: How has it been working on the 360 hardware? What benefits has it offered, which have helped the game evolve?

HL: I'm sure everyone working on the Xbox 360 hardware will agree; the Xbox 360 is a fantastic monster. It sometimes gives you headaches and sleepless nights when you try to explore some innovative things for performance. But it also has incredible features that make some parts of game development a walk in the park. We're using as much thread as possible for maximum performance this time, and it's been great--both in terms of game development and learning more about the Xbox 360.

BlackSite: Area 51 Hands-On

Earlier this week, during a meeting with Midway, we had an opportunity to spend some time with the latest Xbox 360 build of BlackSite: Area 51. Currently in development at Midway Austin, BlackSite: Area 51 is a first-person shooter that's predominantly set in and around the titular "secret" military research facility in Nevada. Our prior time with the game was limited to exploring the small town of Rachel, which we now know to be one of five distinct areas that you'll be doing battle in. On this occasion we were treated to gameplay sequences from three previously unseen locales: the Iraqi village of Ad Dawr (where Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003), another area of Rachel, and a road through the Nevada desert.

The first level of BlackSite: Area 51 is set in Iraq, a couple of years before the events that take place in subsequent levels. Your mission, which takes place during the current real-world conflict, is to enter the village of Ad Dawr, locate an underground bunker where weapons of mass destruction are being researched, and assassinate the guy running the operation. The portion of the mission that we saw started out on the dusty streets of the sun-bleached village and, after moving through the rooms and corridors of a dimly lit makeshift clinic, ended with a lengthy battle in a large courtyard. The environment featured more destructible elements than we've seen in previous builds of the game (including the Xbox Live Arcade demo), including almost all of the most obvious objects to take cover behind, and a statue of a former dictator that we were able to shoot the limbs off.

We were accompanied by a couple of squadmates for the duration of the Iraq sequence, and it didn't take long for us realize that they each had quite different personalities. This mostly became evident through conversations, but also in the ways that they reacted when our orders didn't meet with their approval (sending them into an exposed area during a gunfight, for example) and the game's morale system kicked in. One of our team didn't say an awful lot, but the other was quick to voice her displeasure and made sarcastic comments on more than one occasion. In addition to affecting how your colleagues interact with you vocally, the morale system will have an impact on how effectively they follow your orders. If you keep your squad in cover and make sure you get involved in firefights at least as much as they do, they'll make very effective allies, but if you make a habit of endangering them while hanging back yourself they'll be less interested in risking their lives for you and might become preoccupied with self-preservation rather than killing the enemy.

The gameplay in Iraq is relatively conventional and alien-free.

Our mission in Iraq afforded us not only the arsenal comprising a pistol, an assault rifle, and grenades that appeared in the Xbox Live demo for BlackSite: Area 51, but some time with a powerful sniper rifle and a couple of machine gun turrets as well. The latter proved very effective when we wanted to make a mess of sandbag walls and other objects that enemies were using for cover, while the former was able to kill most enemies with a single, well-placed shot. In one particularly satisfying sequence, we used the sniper rifle to pick off an enemy in a courtyard from a boarded-up window a couple of floors up. The fallen soldier's colleagues were quick to run for cover and, as they did so, we used the butt of the rifle to knock the boards out before picking off a couple more and then switching to the assault rifle. We were impressed at how realistically the enemies responded to our initial attack, and when more of them emerged as the battle ensued, we died after being pinned down behind a rapidly deteriorating wall that didn't serve as cover for nearly as long as we needed to regain some health.

The second level that we took a look at, titled quarantine, took place in a previously unseen area of the small Nevada town of Rachel that was featured in the Xbox Live demo. The town looked very different, not least because we were seeing it bathed in sunshine on this occasion rather than during a late-night downpour. We're told that the aliens in the game have the ability to mess with the weather around Area 51, incidentally, which is why the thunder and lightning in the demo doesn't sound entirely natural. We're not sure how accurately the team at Midway Austin is attempting to model Rachel, but we did notice that the town's "Little A'Le'Inn" restaurant and motel is in there. Our mission on this occasion wasn't to sample tasty alien burgers, though; it was to reach a civilian who had become trapped inside a hut while hiding from aliens. Only a few aliens were visible at first, but plenty of others came out of hiding as we approached the hut, showing off some believable and varied animation as they climbed over trailers and jumped out from behind corners. The battle that ensued was challenging, to say the least, and although it was the aliens that ended up as corpses on the ground rather than our squad, the way that the edges of the screen blurred red and all of the sound became muted (save for a noticeable ringing noise) suggested that we were very close to death at one point. Our time in Rachel ended with a cinematic sequence of sorts, in which the aforementioned civilian detailed some recent events and offered advice. Much like Half-Life 2, BlackSite: Area 51 lets you maintain control of your character during cinematics, which comes in very handy when conversations are interrupted abruptly--on that we'll say no more.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Impressions - First Look at Call of Duty Gone Modern

It can't be easy for most publishers (that aren't named Microsoft) working on first-person shooters due out this fall. After all, said publisher's sci-fi shooter sequel Halo 3 is easily one of the most anticipated games of the year. However, Call of Duty is a pretty big series in its own right, dominating the popular World War II genre with excellent single- and multiplayer gameplay. And with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Infinity Ward has recharged its franchise by busting it out of the World War II setting and giving it a jaw-dropping graphics update.

Get ready for Call of Duty action in a modern-day war.

Perhaps the biggest news with Modern Warfare is that yes, it no longer takes place in World War II, the setting that has served it so well all these years. However, with most of World War II's major battles already featured in a Call of Duty game, it was perhaps time to move on. This new game is set in a modern-day conflict--not in the near future. While the conflict that the game portrays is fictional, Infinity Ward wanted the actual combat to be rooted in today's truth. There are no fancy prototype weapons or equipment here. Everything in Call of Duty 4 is supposed to feel as authentic as possible, and Infinity Ward talked to veterans fresh from Iraq to hear their thoughts on the modern battlefield.

The new game doesn't take place in Iraq. Rather, it sets up a conflict with a mysterious Middle Eastern dictator and his henchmen, who have teamed up with a Russian ultranationalist and his henchmen, thus giving them the media-friendly name of "The Four Horsemen." You'll play primarily as one of two different characters, though you'll occasionally see the conflict through the eyes of other characters as well. The first is a British SAS commando caught up in the Russian storyline, and the other is a US Marine in the middle of the Middle Eastern conflict. How those storylines intersect is the basis of the game's overall plot. Modern Warfare's story will be told mainly through the perspectives of these two characters, since there won't be any fancy third-person cutscenes or glossy news broadcasts. By introducing a modern conflict, Infinity Ward created a storytelling challenge for itself. After all, almost everyone understands what World War II was about, and who the good guys and bad guys were. Introduce an original story, though, and you have to spend a lot more time introducing the various players and factions.

Still, Modern Warfare is a Call of Duty game, and that means that you're going to experience an almost nerve-wracking amount of action. The missions that Infinity Ward showed us featured the trademark intensity that the series is known for, from a nighttime shipboard assault in the midst of a raging thunderstorm to a massive air assault featuring more than a dozen Black Hawk helicopters swooping fast and low over a Middle Eastern city. In fact, the action seems even crazier than before, thanks to the fact that modern weapons and equipment are so much more advanced and lethal than their World War II counterparts. Now, every soldier is armed with an automatic weapon, and there are night-vision goggles, Javelin antitank missiles, and grenade launchers. In at least one mission, you'll serve as the gunner aboard an AC-130 Spectre gunship, providing fire support for troops below; the gameplay looks eerily like real-world gun-camera footage, with radio chatter to match.

The game will feature a brand-new story and impressive new technology.

However, there won't just be wall-to-wall, over-the-top action in Modern Warfare. That tends to be a bit too emotionally exhausting, not to mention repetitive from a storytelling perspective. Instead, Infinity Ward is looking to really mix things up. "What we're really going for is massive variety of gameplay, so along with telling the story in a sort of a 24, never-know-what's-going-to-happen-next style, we're doing the same with the gameplay," said Jason West, Infinity Ward's chief technical officer. So, there will be sniper missions where you have to sneak around, or the aforementioned one-off missions where you experience life as someone other than the two main characters. You'll even get the chance to experience a coup firsthand--from the perspective of the guy being deposed.

Regardless of what you do in the game, it will look absolutely spectacular, thanks to the game's cutting-edge graphics engine. Infinity Ward spent a lot of time showing off the incredible level of detail in the game, including character models that seem as detailed as expensive, 12-inch premium action figures, right down to the shadows cast by individual bullets. Of course, it's hard to appreciate this when pretty much the entire world around you is going to hell--but even the chaos looks impressively realistic. While there's no large-scale environmental destruction, there is material penetration by weapons, so it's possible to kill someone who is crouching beneath a window, or shoot up through the ceiling to get someone on the floor above. "On Call of Duty 2 we were [an Xbox 360] launch title, everyone was learning and ramping up on beta hardware... So now, the artists have been trained up from day zero, so we think this is the best-looking game you'll see on a next-gen console," said Vince Zampella, Infinity Ward chief creative officer. "We've really squeezed a lot out of the hardware, and it looks 10 times better than Call of Duty 2. And I think Call of Duty 2 looks great."

The single-player game alone makes Call of Duty 4 seem very promising, but toss in the multiplayer and it becomes even more impressive. After all, Infinity Ward has built up quite a reputation for multiplayer. The developers note that the Call of Duty games are among the most popular on Xbox Live, and that Call of Duty 2 was the most popular multiplayer game on the Xbox 360 for almost a year. Modern Warfare won't just be Call of Duty 2 multiplayer with new maps and weapons; there are also a ton of new features designed to improve accessibility, community participation, and persistence. Perhaps the most intriguing new feature is the create-a-class ability, which lets you create your own custom soldier, armed with different weapons and equipment, depending on what you've unlocked. Even better are new special abilities that add an almost role-playing-like aspect to the game. There are potentially dozens of special abilities, but you can choose only one or two at any given time, so it becomes a matter of choice. For instance, there's last stand, which gives you a few seconds after you're killed to pull out and use the pistol to shoot the person who got you. Heavy endurance will let you sprint farther, and fast reload will let you reload faster. Or there's martyrdom, which automatically drops a live grenade if you die. Perhaps the nastiest one we heard of lets you eavesdrop on the other team's voice communications.

Call of Duty 4 will also offer brand-new multiplayer options to go with its intense action.

In terms of community, Modern Warfare will introduce a Halo-style party system that will make playing with your friends a lot easier. Best of all, the multiplayer graphics look as good as the single-player. There's no sacrifice in graphical quality that we could see, and it's quite possibly the prettiest multiplayer gameplay that we've ever seen.

Having the Call of Duty name is already enough to get the attention of most shooter fans, but Modern Warfare really looks like a huge leap forward for the franchise, and it's hard to imagine how this will not be one of the biggest games of the year. The shift to modern times has injected the series with new energy and gameplay, and it all looks great. But best of all, Infinity Ward has revealed that the game is already far along in development, and it's on track for release sometime this fall.

Overlord Updated Hands-On - It's Good to be Evil

Overlord, the latest game from Age of Wonders developer Triumph Studios, is in a peculiar genre of games that encourages you to be as evil as you want, which is perhaps best represented in Bullfrog's old Dungeon Keeper series of games. Overlord puts you in the role of, well, an overlord who has recently been reincarnated after his destruction at the hands of seven valiant heroes. As you come back to life, you're tasked with rebuilding your castle, which was ransacked by the heroes, as well as wreaking vengeance upon those who killed you.

When you see something too heavy to carry, you'll have to task your minions to bring it back to your tower.

Our counterparts at GameSpot UK recently wrote a lengthy preview on the Xbox 360 version of the game, which we encourage you to read if you want details on the basic aspects of it. In short, you--as the Overlord--will be tasked with rebuilding your castle, which is accomplished by finding items that were looted from it. You're also tasked with reestablishing control of the kingdom by eliminating races that rule over the peons that tend to your fields, as well as eventually finding and killing the seven heroes that have scattered across the land.

You do all this by controlling imp minions of various sorts. Your minions are going to do the hard work that you require, such as destroying barricades, attacking enemies, raising gates, and so on. You start off with only five minions to your name, but you will eventually be able to control up to 50 of the little guys. As you pillage the towns or villages of the countryside, your imps will find new equipment for themselves and eventually upgrade their attack capabilities. Although you can only control soldier minions initially, you'll eventually unlock fire archer minions, healers, and so on.

All of this should be familiar to anyone who tried the recently released demo of the game. The default mouse/keyboard control scheme is fairly awkward compared with that of a gamepad because it often forces you to hold down both the left and right mouse buttons to sweep your minions across the screen. (The game works fine with an Xbox 360 controller plugged into your computer, so that's obviously going to be the preferable input method.) But what's perhaps more annoying is the fact that the configuration menus for graphical options and keyboard bindings are located in the start menu. If you want to tweak your graphics or rebind a key, you'll have to exit to Windows and do it there; it's impossible to perform these simple tasks from the in-game menu.

If your minions happen across a flagon of mead, they'll quickly get drunk and eventually urinate all over the ground.

That said, assuming you can get the graphics set up to your liking and have a spare 360 controller lying around, you should be able to have a perfectly good time with the PC version of Overlord. After breezing through the content in the demo (which sees you rescuing the humans of a town named Spree from the clutches of evil halflings), we proceeded on to the main meat of the game. This is where you and your horde of minions enter the town of Spree to speak to the civilians within it. There's no role-playing-game-style dialogue menu or anything like that; rather, you simply walk up to a peon, and he or she will either say something to you or a cutscene will play if that peon wants you to take on a new quest.

Spree winds up acting as something of a quest hub for your overlord, with a half-dozen or so quests getting dropped in your lap when you first arrive. But many of those quests are initially impossible to attempt, thanks to walls of flame that block your path. However, you are capable of chasing down food that was stolen from your peons and taken to the halflings' burrows. With our minions in tow, we charged into the Hobbit-esque dwellings and recovered the food from the cooks deep within the structures. It was then that we were given a choice right out of an RPG: We were asked to either give the peons back the food or steal it for our own minions. Performing evil acts, like stealing the food, boosts your powers. But being decent and letting the peons have their way will keep them happy, which in turn will eventually boost the amount of gold you can take from them. Either way, you win!

Melvin will quickly dispatch your minions, but your overlord can take him down with a little work.

Playing on, we eventually managed to take on the first of the seven knights, a grotesque halfling named Melvin Underbelly. While most of the halflings stood at about half the height of our overlord, Melvin had apparently taken on the habits of a glutton and ballooned to many times his original size. He attacked us by doing massive belly flops, rolling around and attempting to smash us. He quickly dispatched our minions, forcing us to take our overlord in for some rare combat. After analyzing the pattern, we were able to avoid Melvin's attacks and wear him down. Thus, we eventually destroyed him, which led to freeing our second type of minion, the reds. Red minions are capable of absorbing fire into their bodies, allowing us to uncover many new paths in the world.

While it's apparent that Overlord was developed for the Xbox 360 first and foremost, it seems like it should wind up being a perfectly fun game on the PC, assuming you have a compatible gamepad to use instead of the cumbersome default controls. The game is scheduled to ship later in June, so stay tuned to GamerWorld for a full review.

BioShock Exclusive Hands-On Impressions - Later-Game Missions, Character Development, and Battles Under the Sea

At one point, first-person shooters were fast-paced arcade-style games in which you dashed around corridors, blasting monsters from a first-person perspective. But Irrational Games is looking to make a very different kind of shooter--one that is big on creepy atmosphere and tells an alternate-history story of mid-20th century experimental genetics turned into a nightmare. If you've been following BioShock's progress, you know that you play as a character who finds himself stuck in Rapture, a ruined undersea paradise where society's best and brightest fled beneath the waves to lead idyllic lives. However, the inhabitants of the city have discovered the secret of "Adam," an addictive genetic substance that enhances their appearances and abilities. This substance, though, also causes their bodies and minds to degenerate, turning many into mindless monsters. Your character is riding in a plane that crashes in the middle of the ocean where the closest thing to salvation is a mysterious stairway with a bathysphere that leads down to the ruined city, and your adventures begin there.

In BioShock, you must solve the mystery of the ruined city of Rapture.

You may know already that the world of Rapture presents a virtual ecology of different beings, including the Adam-crazed splicers (who will attack you on sight) and the pale-faced little sisters who draw Adam from corpses. This ecology also includes the massive and extremely tough big daddies who defend the little sisters with their lives even as you try to scrounge up Adam for yourself to power your character's own abilities, which can either be "plasmids" (active powers, such as the ability to hurl lightning bolts or freeze enemies solid) or "gene tonics" (passive abilities that are constantly in effect, such as increased stealth skills that mask your presence to certain enemies). We've covered how you'll encounter alarm systems, mechanized sentry drones, and turrets that will need to be avoided, destroyed, or hacked to work in your favor. And we've also covered the way the game tells its story, piecemeal, by way of audio journals and preloaded cinema reels left by Rapture survivors. These survivors include Atlas, an Irish immigrant who seems to be your only ally, and Andrew Ryan, the mastermind geneticist who appears to be the game's archvillain. Bioshock's story unfolds in a way that is similar to Irrational's cult classic game System Shock 2. Now, we'll go into a slightly more-advanced area of the game, Arcadia, which appears about a third of the way through BioShock. Please be advised that this preview may contain minor story spoilers.

Throughout the course of the game, your character will have been able to find and equip himself with a variety of firearms, such as a pistol, a shotgun, a ballistic grenade launcher, and even a Thompson-class submachine gun (better known as a Tommy gun), as well as a camera that can be used to snap photos of various enemies, further exposing their weaknesses. In addition, you'll be able to find or purchase different ammo types for your weapons that are better used against certain enemy types, such as antipersonnel bullets that can quickly bring down splicers or antimechanical ammo that can bring down sentry drones in a hurry. You'll also find (or buy) various mechanical spare parts you can use to upgrade any of your weapons (or your camera). Deciding which of your items to upgrade will be part of the game's strategy. Along with various Adam upgrades, upgrading items will add a role-playing game-like character advancement element to the game, even though you aren't gaining any experience points.

You'll also be able to pick up various Adam-based powers, either by looting them from fallen foes or hidden nooks and by purchasing them from various vending machines scattered throughout the area. However, as an audio log that you pick up early in the game suggests, injecting your body with Adam from fallen foes also injects part of their consciousness and memories into your character's mind. This is why you'll occasionally see ghostly figures reenacting their last moments when you enter a new area for the first time. In the work-in-progress version of the game we played, we began our updated adventure equipped with these weapons and several different plasmid powers; even so, we were hard-pressed to survive the latest leg of our quest.

You'll have superhuman powers, but so will your enemies.

By the time you reach Arcadia, the city's lush garden district, the mysterious Andrew Ryan has already become aware of your presence and begins actively seeking ways to eliminate you. In this case, he tries to destroy all the plant life in the city, thereby eliminating Rapture's primary source of oxygen, which would cause you--and most of the city's other inhabitants--to die of suffocation. To save yourself, you must rendezvous with one of the city's few sane survivors, a botanist who might have puzzled out a means to restore the city's plant life, which she suggests in one of many recorded logs you recover.

To get to her, you'll need to traverse several wings of the city, inhabited by hostile splicers that regularly respawn even after you've cleared them out. This is apparently because the majority of the city's inhabitants have become splicers that constantly roam the streets in search of Adam. Combat in BioShock seems to offer lots of variety: You can try to play it as a straightforward action game and plow through your enemies with guns blazing, but this isn't usually the most effective way to handle things. Splicers are a noisy group, often chattering constantly and incoherently about their Adam cravings as they wander the halls. You can use this to your advantage in getting the drop on them. In fact, if you care to, you can actually load up on stealth-based gene tonics that will make it harder for splicers or mechanical sentries, such as the mechanized alarms that are tied to flying gun drones and machine gun turrets scattered across the city, to detect you. By using stealth, we were able to eliminate enemies from a distance; we used lightning-based plasmid powers to electrocute splicers that happened to be standing in water, or we used fire-based powers to incinerate enemies that happened to be standing in a pool of spilled oil.

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