Unicorn Overlord Review

Less than a year after its first announcement, Unicorn Overlord launches during a busy 2024. Is this strategy game worth checking out, or should you play something else? Check out our review here and find out.

Unicorn Overlord Review

Unicorn Overlord follows the story of Alain, a young prince who loses his homeland as a baby. One night, you are whisked away before your kingdom is sacked and captured by an old ally. Fast forward some years, and you are a lord of a small island that also gets invaded. Your first job as lord is to fight off the enemy and protect your island. You push the enemy back and find out it is being led by one of your mother’s former knights. After beating him down, you use the ring you inherited to cleanse the curse put on the knight. He explains that he doesn’t know what happened; one day, he served happily, and then it’s all blank.

With this information in hand, you set off to reclaim your kingdom and help anyone else who has been mind-controlled by the enemy lord. It won’t be easy, though, because while you were off hiding, the entire continent was invaded and taken over. Once you see the suffering of the people, you start helping them out, and in turn, they assist you by giving you items, a place to stay, and even new recruits for your army. It’s a big, beefy game, and you are looking at around 50 or more hours to complete it easily.

While Unicorn Overlord is a strategy game, it is also an auto-battler. Most of the tactics are set up before you engage in combat, and when you do fight, units act on their own accord. Think of it more as you are a general guiding the troops and putting them in the right spot to succeed. You still need to put the right soldiers together in order to make a strong unit. Sending in your horse units against spear enemies isn’t a great idea since spear guys have advantages against horses. If you send them with a detachment of infantry, you can switch who attacks and have the cavalry backing up your other unit. It will take a couple of battles to get used to, but I was hooked after I got the swing of things.

Assigning their tactics is one way you can “control” your troops. Here, you can pick what type of targets they attack, who they should focus on healing, and which moves the character should prioritize in battle. You can leave the default tactics on and get pretty far, but the later-game battles require more effort. Even early in the game, you can make a few adjustments to help your team out. For instance, making sure your healer heals the LOWEST ally and not a specific ally over and over is just a good idea. It adds to the depth, but it isn’t an insane system.

While not battling, you will be searching the overworld for new towns to liberate, materials to craft with, and side quests to complete. When you liberate a city, it will often be in bad shape. You can upgrade the city back to its former glory by doing quests to turn in materials. When that is done, you can assign a guard (who doesn’t actually leave your party) to watch it and gather more materials. The next time you take a village, your guard will bring you a handful of upgrade mats. The more you take, the more loot you get each time you capture a new one. Plus, each place you capture generally has one good piece of gear worth checking out, giving you a reason to take every town.

The other thing you get from taking cities and doing side quests is Renown. The Renown is a currency mainly used to add more units to your army or make an existing unit able to hold more troops. When you start, all your units can only hold two troops each, but later, you can place four or five in a unit if you have the Renown to do it. Your army can get extremely strong when you have that many units on the field, but so can the enemies. As you get stronger, they will as well, so you are always on your toes. You burn Renown to get advanced classes for your units later in the game. The point is you will be grinding that alongside experience and gold.

I don’t like a couple of things about the game. The battles are timed, which would be alright if it wasn’t such a quick timer. They do it because some of the battles have endless enemy spawns, and you could grind exp and money forever that way, but it’s still annoying. Enemies will spawn behind your camp when you have all your units out, leaving you exposed. If they take your main camp, then you will lose. And I hate enemy thieves stealing my gold and running out of the map. They should die if I win the battle, and I get my loot back. These are just minor gripes of a game I am really enjoying.

Unicorn Overlord might be an early GOTY contender for me. Fans of strategy games should download the demo and play it immediately.