Overture Review

The roguelike genre is doing rather well at the moment, and the latest addition to it is Overture. Borrowing heavily from Gauntlet, Diablo and (I am told, never played it myself) Legend of Zelda. This is a roguelike bullet hell of a game with an amazing chiptune soundtrack that harks back to classic games of my childhood like Sabrewulf and also reminded me of the intro to Alestorm’s “1741 (The Battle of Cartagena)” and sprites reminding the player of to the golden days of 80s arcades.

What you get is a hackneyed plot about someone called Cyrus kidnapping an Oracle, and of course you, the retired hero, are the only one to rescue said vamoosed mystic and defeat said miscreant.

Other than that it’s 24 classes, built from the classic four of Warrior, Rogue, Mage, and Shaman. Each of these classes can be levelled up in the usual fantasy game kind of way to make them tougher to kill. With a total of 10 levels to survive, each level stocked to the gills with beasties, mini-bosses, gate-bosses and afterwards a floor-boss that needs more concentrated fire, with the understanding that you run out of the way of fire a lot faster when you’re not shooting (it’s an on-screen loading tip in case you find it difficult to work this out) while he throws nasty stuff at you.

That pretty much sums up the game: you kill things, you get loot, you giggle like a maniac filling the randomly generated dungeons with the corpses of your victims. There are chest to loot and items to grab, like I already mentioned, but the simple truth is it’s a bullet hell roguelike. Run fast, and if it’s not you kill it.

Every so often you will find an NPC to fight alongside you and a swarm of bad things to kill, but it’s just run-stab-repeat, get to the end, celebrate. Like most procedurally generated games, there’s not a great deal of depth to this one, but if you have an hour (or six) to kill, it’s worth a punt.